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Mabou Mines
Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s
Iris Smith Fischer
University of Michigan Press, 2012

The theater company Mabou Mines has for the past forty years created pathbreaking new theater by combining the latest concepts in music, visual arts, and technology with traditional forms of creative expression: puppetry, text, movement, theater design. From the beginning, the evanescence of performance and the dynamics of group work attracted the group. Most of their early pieces were never recorded, leaving little documentation of their foundational productions. Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s provides this missing history, attempting to capture and describe the explorations of a group who set out to create indescribable performance. Iris Smith Fischer makes visible once again the celebrated company's least documented work, and offers accounts of the decisions and events that defined Mabou Mines' ideas and methods, particularly their creative collaborations with visual artists, musicians, writers, and dancers. Focusing on the heady days of the company's founding and first ten years, the book traces Mabou Mines' intellectual and artistic roots, frames them within the 1970s avant-garde, and outlines their significance in contemporary performance.

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Macaronic Sermons
Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England
Siegfried Wenzel
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Siegfried Wenzel's groundbreaking study seeks to describe and analyze the linguistically mixed, or macaronic, sermons in late fourteenth-century England.  Not only are these works of considerable religious interest, they provide extensive information on their literary, linguistic, and cultural milieux.
 
Macaronic Sermons begins by offering a typology of such works: those in which English words offer glosses, or offer structural functions, or offer neither of the two but yet are syntactically integrated.  This last group is then examined in detail: reasons are given for this usage and for its origins, based on the realities of fourteenth-century England.
 
Siefriend Wenzel draws valuable conclusions about the linguistic status quo of the era, together with the extent of education, the audiences' expectations, and the ways in which the authors' minds worked.
 
Obviously of interest to scholars and students of early English literature, Macaronic Sermons also contains much valuable information for specialists in language development or oral theory, and for those interested in multicultural societies.
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Mad at School
Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life
Margaret Price
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"A very important study that will appeal to a disability studies audience as well as scholars in social movements, social justice, critical pedagogy, literacy education, professional development for disability and learning specialists in access centers and student counseling centers, as well as the broader domains of sociology and education."
---Melanie Panitch, Ryerson University

"Ableism is alive and well in higher education. We do not know how to abandon the myth of the 'pure (ivory) tower that props up and is propped up by ableist ideology.' . . . Mad at School is thoroughly researched and pathbreaking. . . . The author's presentation of her own experience with mental illness is woven throughout the text with candor and eloquence."
---Linda Ware, State University of New York at Geneseo

Mad at School explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in the setting of U.S. higher education. Much of the research and teaching within disability studies assumes a disabled body but a rational and energetic (an "agile") mind. In Mad at School, scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind?

Mental disability (more often called "mental illness") is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Mad at School is a close study of the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture. Investigating spaces including classrooms, faculty meeting rooms, and job searches, Price challenges her readers to reconsider long-held values of academic life, including productivity, participation, security, and independence. Ultimately, she argues that academic discourse both produces and is produced by a tacitly privileged "able mind," and that U.S. higher education would benefit from practices that create a more accessible academic world.

Mad at School is the first book to use a disability-studies perspective to focus on the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture at institutions of higher education. Individual chapters examine the language used to denote mental disability; the role of "participation" and "presence" in student learning; the role of "collegiality" in faculty work; the controversy over "security" and free speech that has arisen in the wake of recent school shootings; and the marginalized status of independent scholars with mental disabilities.

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College.

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Mad Heart Be Brave
Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali
Kazim Ali, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Born and raised in Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) came to the United States in the mid-1970s to pursue graduate study in literature; by the mid-1980s, he had begun to establish himself as one of the most important American poets of the late 20th century.
 
Mad Heart Be Brave: On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali is the first comprehensive examination of all stages of his career, from his earliest work published in India but never reissued in the U.S., through his seven poetry volumes from American publishers, ultimately collected as The Veiled Suite. The essays, written by a range of poets and scholars, many of whom knew and studied with Ali, consider his early free verse poetry; his transition into writing more formalist poetry; his correspondence with poets Anthony Hecht and James Merrill; his literary engagement with the political realities of contemporary Kashmir; his teaching and mentorship of young poets; and Ali’s championing of the ghazal, a traditional Eastern poetic form, in English. Some essays have a predominantly scholarly focus, while others are more personal in their tone and content. All exhibit a deep appreciation for Ali’s life and work.
 
Contributors to this volume include Sejal Shah, Rita Banerjee, Amanda Golden, Ravi Shankar, Abin Chakraborty, Amy Newman, Christopher Merrill, Jason Schneiderman, Stephen Burt, Raza Ali Hassan, Syed Humayoun, Feroz Rather, Dur e Aziz Amna, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Mahwash Shoaib, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Grace Schulman, and Ada Limón. Mad Heart Be Brave closes with a long biographical sketch and elegy by Agha Shahid Ali’s friend Amitav Ghosh and a comprehensive bibliography assembled by scholar Patricia O’Neill with Reid Larson.

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Made with Words
May Swenson
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Made With Words collects prose by May Swenson (1919-89), whom critic and poet John Hollander has called "one of our few unquestionably major poets." Born in Logan, Utah, she spent most of her adult life living and writing in New York City. She was an editor for New Directions Paperbacks, and a writer-in-residence at numerous universities during the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout her long and illustrious career, Swenson produced nine volumes of verse, including New and Selected Things Taking Place and In Other Words: New Poems. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and received a multitude of grants and awards during her lifetime.
Made with Words includes a rich assortment of Swenson's prose, including several short stories, by turns amusing, provocative, and poetic, and inextricably bound with her poetic oeuvre; a one-act play entitled The Floor, produced in New York in the mid-sixties; interviews and book reviews that shed light on Swenson's poetic development as well as her literary and artistic tastes; and finally, a collection of Swenson's letters to the poet Elizabeth Bishop that reveal the intricacies of three decades of their personal and professional relationship. The critical and biographical introduction provides an engaging glimpse into the creative life and prose work of an important contemporary American poet.
Gardner McFall is Assistant Professor of Literature, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She is the author of The Pilot's Daughter; Naming the Animals; and Jonathan's Cloud.
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Made-Up Asians
Yellowface During the Exclusion Era
Esther Kim Lee
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Made-Up Asians traces the history of yellowface, the theatrical convention of non-Asian actors putting on makeup and costume to look East Asian. Using specific case studies from European and U.S. theater, race science, and early film, Esther Kim Lee traces the development of yellowface in the U.S. context during the Exclusion Era (1862–1940), when Asians faced legal and cultural exclusion from immigration and citizenship. These caricatured, distorted, and misrepresented versions of Asians took the place of excluded Asians on theatrical stages and cinema screens. The book examines a wide-ranging set of primary sources, including makeup guidebooks, play catalogs, advertisements, biographies, and backstage anecdotes, providing new ways of understanding and categorizing yellowface as theatrical practice and historical subject. Made-Up Asians also shows how lingering effects of Asian exclusionary laws can still be seen in yellowface performances, casting practices, and anti-Asian violence into the 21st century. 
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The Madisonian Turn
Political Parties and Parliamentary Democracy in Nordic Europe
Torbjörn Bergman and Kaare Strøm, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Parliamentary democracy is the most common regime type in the contemporary political world, but the quality of governance depends on effective parliamentary oversight and strong political parties. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have traditionally been strongholds of parliamentary democracy. In recent years, however, critics have suggested that new challenges such as weakened popular attachment, the advent of cartel parties, the judicialization of politics, and European integration have threatened the institutions of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic region.

This volume examines these claims and their implications. The authors find that the Nordic states have moved away from their previous resemblance to a Westminster model toward a form of parliamentary democracy with more separation-of-powers features—a Madisonian model. These features are evident both in vertical power relations (e.g., relations with the European Union) and horizontal ones (e.g., increasingly independent courts and central banks). Yet these developments are far from uniform and demonstrate that there may be different responses to the political challenges faced by contemporary Western democracies.

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The Magellan Fallacy
Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish
Adam Lifshey
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Winner of the 2015 A-Asia/ICAS Africa-Asia Book Prize, a global competition, for the best book in English, French, or Portuguese on any topic linking Asia and Africa.

The Magellan Fallacy argues that literature in Spanish from Asia and Africa, though virtually unknown, reimagines the supposed centers and peripheries of the modern world in fundamental ways. Through archival research and comparative readings, The Magellan Fallacy rethinks mainstream mappings of diverse cultures while advocating the creation of a new field of scholarship: global literature in Spanish. As the first attempt to analyze Asian and African literature in Spanish together, and doing so while ranging over all continents, The Magellan Fallacy crosses geopolitical and cultural borders without end. The implications of the book, therefore, extend far beyond the lands formerly ruled by the Spanish empire. The Magellan Fallacy shows that all theories of globalization, including those focused on the Americas and Europe, must be able to account for the varied significances of hispanophone Asia and Africa as well.


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Magnificent Méliès
The Authorized Biography
Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, translated by Kel Pero, edited by Matthew Solomon
University of Michigan Press, 2022
The films of Georges Méliès (1861–1938) are landmarks in the early history of narrative filmmaking and cinematic special effects. He was a harbinger of modern aesthetics and media manipulation, and this book, written by his granddaughter, is the only one that tells his full story. Magnificent Méliès is a thoroughly researched but highly accessible book that is a crucial source for the scholar and an entertaining read for the nonspecialist. The core of the biography provides detailed accounts of Méliès’ filmmaking years (1896–1913), from his first motion pictures shortly after the public premiere of the Lumière Cinématographe through such worldwide successes as his film Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) and his eventual marginalization by the very industry he had helped to found. The biography also chronicles Méliès’ formative work as director of Paris’s preeminent magic theater, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin; his subsequent career staging operettas for the Théâtre des Variétés Artistiques  (1917–1923) in Montreuil on the site of one of his former film studios; and his later years selling toys and candy at the Gare Montparnasse (1926–1932) before being rediscovered by journalists and the avant-garde. These and other fascinating chapters highlight the remarkable range of Méliès’ creative work while suggesting how his singular life was nevertheless shaped by the seismic historical shifts of Second Empire and Third Republic France.
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Magnus Felix Ennodius
A Gentleman of the Church
S. A. H. Kennell
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Magnus Felix Ennodius (474-521), deacon of Milan and bishop of Pavia in the turbulent years after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, was a prolific writer of letters, poetry, speeches, and pamphlets on the controversies that beset the church in his day. In the Middle Ages, he was read as a model of style and source of canon law. More recently, however, Ennodius' writings have been denigrated as the vapid product of a frivolous mind more concerned with form than content. Magnus Felix Ennodius: A Gentleman of the Church sets the record straight by restoring Ennodius to his social and literary context. Ennodius stands revealed as a man on the cusp of the ancient and medieval worlds, his thought still shaped according to classical norms, but his writings informed with a sensibility that prefigures that of the Christian Middle Ages. As the only book-length study of Ennodius, here the author explores all aspects of Ennodius' life and literary production to augment the collective understanding of him on two major fronts, rhetoric and meaning, so that he can take his place as an important author and historical figure. Deeply insightful, and refreshingly original, the author breaks new ground in studying this period of history, so often overshadowed by the classical and middle ages that immediately precede and succeed it.
S. A. H. Kennell is Adjunct Professor of Classics, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
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Maguey Utilization in Highland Central Mexico
An Archaeological Ethnography
Jeffrey R. Parsons and Mary H. Parsons
University of Michigan Press, 1990
The maguey plant plays a central role in cultural adaptation and cultural change in highland Mesoamerica. This book is a comprehensive study of the plant and its use. Includes chapters on maguey cultivation and pulque production, maguey fiber processing and spinning, and the archaeological implications of the available ethnographic and historic information about maguey utilization.
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Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England
James Fitzmaurice, Carol L. Barash, Eugene R. Cunnar, Nancy A. Gutierrez, and Josephine A. Roberts, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Many would find it difficult to name a woman writer in England before Jane Austen, even though women were writing as early as the time of Chaucer. It was during the seventeenth century, however, that women writers ceased to be viewed as odd or remarkable and became accepted as regular and often respected members of the literary world. The enormous commercial and artistic success of Aphra Behn's plays on the London stage of the 1670s and '80s marked the end of the time where only men were literary luminaries. Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England brings together in one volume a rich assortment of writing by the women Behn influenced, as well as those who preceded her. Collected are works by Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Aemelia Lanyer, Katherine Philips, Ester Sowernam, Rachel Speght, and Mary Wroth.
The texts included are newly edited and rely on the best manuscripts and editions of the time. They are accompanied by clear introductions, helpful explanatory notes, and a range of illustrations from the period. The book will appeal to all those with an interest in the rich literary record of the period.
Editors: James Fitzmaurice, Northern Arizona University; Josephine A. Roberts, Louisiana State University; Carol L. Barash, Seton Hall University; Eugene R. Cunnar, New Mexico State University; and Nancy A. Gutierrez, Arizona State University.
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Majoritarian Cities
Policy Making and Inequality in Urban Politics
Neil Kraus
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Neil Kraus evaluates both the influence of public opinion on local policy-making and the extent to which public policy addresses economic and social inequalities. Drawing on several years of fieldwork and multiple sources of data, including surveys and polls; initiatives, referenda, and election results; government documents; focus groups; interviews; and a wide assortment of secondary sources, Kraus presents case studies of two Midwestern cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Gary, Indiana. Specifically, he focuses on several major policy decisions in recent decades concerning education, law enforcement, and affordable housing in Minneapolis; and education and riverboat casino development in Gary.

Kraus finds that, on these issues, local officials frequently take action that reflects public opinion, yet the resulting policies often fail to meet the needs of the disadvantaged or ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty. In light of citizens’ current attitudes, he concludes that if patterns of inequality are to be more effectively addressed, scholars and policymakers must transform the debate about the causes and effects of inequality in urban and metropolitan settings.

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Make a Wish
Judy Soloway Kay
University of Michigan Press, 2005
It was love at first sight when aspiring actors Abby Nicholson and Lucas Miller met at an audition in NewYork City. After just a few months, their romance seemed destined for marriage. But will their love survive when the demands of their careers and families get in the way?

Genre: Romance
Length: about 15,000 words
Level: 4th grade
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Make Us Wave Back
Essays on Poetry and Influence
Michael Collier
University of Michigan Press, 2007

“Michael Collier’s book is refreshing in its refusal to push for one particular aesthetic. He regards his own preference for realism over abstraction as more a matter of temperament than of considered judgment, and respects poets more skeptical than he is about the ability of poetry to connect with the world. The result is an engaging record of his influences and enthusiasms, which are wide enough to include both Whitman and Larkin, both Jorge Borges and William Maxwell.”

—Carl Dennis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Unknown Friends and Practical Gods

“Michael Collier combines pietas and wildness in these essays on poetry as inheritance, and poetry as struggle. One feels the young man in his ‘rampage of literature,’ and the older writer reflecting on an art that is at once personal and impersonal, deeply matured in the imagination. This is a wise and well-lived book.”

—Rosanna Warren, author of Departure and Stained Glass

“The essays and remembrances in Make Us Wave Back radiate Michael Collier’s characteristic insight and sagacity on every page. Clear-minded, ardent, brightly illuminating the art of poetry, this is as lucid as writing about writing gets.”

—Campbell McGrath, author of Pax Atomica and Florida Poems

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Michael Collier explores the influences that have made him one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Make Us Wave Back includes essays on an expansive list of subjects, among them the literary correspondence of William Maxwell; the meaning of the author’s own role as poet laureate of the state of Maryland; the journals of Louise Bogan and how they reveal Bogan’s struggle with her own personal fears as well as the reconstruction of herself as a writer; and many more.

Michael Collier is Professor of English and Codirector of the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. He is also director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is the author of several books of poems, including The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, and The Ledge.

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Making Academic Presentations
What Every University Student Needs to Know
Robyn Brinks Lockwood
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The ability to give a successful presentation in an academic setting is critical to success both on and off campus. Making Academic Presentations describes the five moves, or parts, of a typical presentation and provides examples of language that can be used to successfully accomplish these moves. Although language is vital to giving a good presentation, the book also addresses other factors that influence the success of a presentation, such as overcoming nervousness, nonverbal communication, and pronunciation and paralinguistics. 

The book includes a variety of tasks that will help students practice developing and analyzing presentations as well as practice projects for applying these lessons. In addition, rubrics and evaluation forms are included for instructors to adapt and use for evaluation purposes.
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Making Endless War
The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law
Brian Cuddy and Victor Kattan, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Making Endless War is built on the premise that any attempt to understand how the content and function of the laws of war changed in the second half of the twentieth century should consider two major armed conflicts, fought on opposite edges of Asia, and the legal pathways that link them together across time and space. The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli conflicts have been particularly significant in the shaping and attempted remaking of international law from 1945 right through to the present day. This carefully curated collection of essays by lawyers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political geographers of war explores the significance of these two conflicts, including their impact on the politics and culture of the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America. The volume foregrounds attempts to develop legal rationales for the continued waging of war after 1945 by moving beyond explaining the end of war as a legal institution, and toward understanding the attempted institutionalization of endless war.

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Making Human
World Order and the Global Governance of Human Dignity
Matthew S. Weinert
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Differences between human beings have long been used to justify a range of degrading, exclusionary, and murderous practices that strip people of their humanity and dignity. While considerable scholarship has been devoted to such dehumanization, Matthew S. Weinert asks how we might conceive its reverse—humanization, or what it means to “make human.”

Weinert proposes an account of making human centered on five mechanisms: reflection, recognition, resistance, replication of dominant mores, and responsibility. Examining cases such as the UN Security Council’s engagements with crises and the International Court of Justice’s grappling with Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, he illustrates the distinct and contingent ways these mechanisms have been deployed. Theoretically, the cases evince a complex, evolving relationship between state-centric and human-centric views of society, ultimately revealing the normative potentialities of both.

Though the case studies concern specific human relations issues on an international level, Weinert argues in favor of starting from the shared problem of being human and of living in a world in which the humanity of countless groups has been demeaned or denied. Working outward from that point, he proposes, we obtain a more pragmatically grounded understanding of the social construction of the human being.
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Making Israel
Benny Morris, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2007
Benny Morris is the founding father of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have challenged long-established perceptions about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their research rigorously documented crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli armed forces, including rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing. With Making Israel, Morris brings together the first collection of translated articles on the New History by leading Zionist and revisionist Israeli historians, providing Americans with a firsthand view of this important debate and enabling a better understanding of how the New Historians have influenced Israelis' awareness of their own past.
 
"The study of Israeli history, society, politics, and economics over the past two decades has been marked by a fierce and sometimes highly personal debate between 'traditionalists'---scholars who generally interpreted Israeli history and society within the Zionist ethos---and 'revisionists'---scholars who challenged conventional Zionist narratives of Israeli history and society. Making Israel brings together traditionalists and revisionists who openly and directly lay out their key insights about Israel's origins. It also introduces multidisciplinary perspectives on Israel by historians and sociologists, each bringing into the debate its own jargon, its own epistemology and methodology, and its own array of substantive issues. This is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the different interpretations of Israeli society and perhaps the central debate among students of modern Israel."
---Zeev Maoz, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis, and Distinguished Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya
 
"Israel's 'new historians' have done a great service to their country, and to all who care about the Arab-Israeli conflict. By challenging myths, reexamining evidence, and asking truly important questions about the past they help to confront the present with honesty and realism. This book provides a sampling of the best of what these courageous voices have to offer."
---William B. Quandt, University of Virginia
 
Benny Morris is Professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel, and is the author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999.
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Making Men Ridiculous
Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual
Christopher Nappa
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Writing during the reign of emperors Trajan and Hadrian, Juvenal drew on Roman legend and the history of preceding imperial dynasties as a means of scrutinizing cultural upheavals in the Rome of his day. Tacky foreigners, the nouveaux riches, women who don’t know their place, bloodthirsty—even crazy—emperors and their (often worse) wives confront the reader at every turn, along with bad poets, corrupt aristocrats, gladiators, whores, false philosophers, sad-sack men in the street, and slaves. Juvenal’s poetry set the tone, and often the topics, for satirists throughout the centuries of European literature.

In his sixteen verse satires, Juvenal presents speakers who decry the breakdown in traditional Roman values and the status of Roman men as they are confronted by upstart foreigners, devious and deviant women, class traitors, the power of the imperial household, and even the body itself. The satirist castigates vice and immorality even as he revels in describing them. This book locates Juvenal’s targets among the matrices of birth, wealth, class, gender, and ethnicity and walks carefully through a number of his most arresting vignettes in order to show not only what, but how, he satirizes. Moreover, the analysis shows that Juvenal’s portraits sometimes escape his grasp, and, as often as not, he ends up undermining the voice with which he speaks and the values he claims to hold dear. Individual chapters look at the satirist himself, rebellious bodies, disgraced aristocrats, uppity (even murderous) wives, and the necessary but corrupting power of money. The conclusion considers the endurance of both the targets and the rhetoric behind them in the modern world.

Making Men Ridiculous will interest scholars and advanced students of ancient satire, later European satire, imperial Roman culture and literature, and class, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world.
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Making Money in Ancient Athens
Michael Leese
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Given their cultural, intellectual, and scientific achievements, surely the Greeks were able to approach their economic affairs in a rational manner like modern individuals? Since the nineteenth century, many scholars have argued that premodern people did not behave like modern businesspeople, and that the “stagnation” that characterized the economy prior to the Industrial Revolution can be explained by a prevailing noneconomic mentality throughout premodern (and nonwestern) societies. This view, which simultaneously extols the “sophistication” of the modern West, relegates all other civilizations to the status of economic backwardness.

But the evidence from ancient Athens, which is one of the best-documented societies in the premodern world, tells a very different story: one of progress, innovation, and rational economic strategies. Making Money in Ancient Athens examines in the most comprehensive manner possible the voluminous source material that has survived from Athens in inscriptions, private lawsuit speeches, and the works of philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. Inheritance cases that detail estate composition and investment choices, and maritime trade deals gone wrong, provide unparalleled glimpses into the specific factors that influenced Athenians at the level of the economic decision-making process itself, and the motivations that guided the specific economic transactions attested in the source material. Armed with some of the most thoroughly documented case studies and the richest variety of source material from the ancient Greek world, Michael Leese argues that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that ancient Athenians achieved the type of long-term profit and wealth maximization and continuous reinvestment of profits into additional productive enterprise that have been argued as unique to (and therefore responsible for) the modern industrial-capitalist system.
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Making News at The New York Times
Nikki Usher
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Making News at The New York Times is the first in-depth portrait of the nation’s, if not the world's, premier newspaper in the digital age. It presents a lively chronicle of months spent in the newsroom observing daily conversations, meetings, and journalists at work. We see Page One meetings, articles developed for online and print from start to finish, the creation of ambitious multimedia projects, and the ethical dilemmas posed by social media in the newsroom. Here, the reality of creating news in a 24/7 instant information environment clashes with the storied history of print journalism, and the tensions present a dramatic portrait of news in the online world.

This news ethnography brings to bear the overarching value clashes at play in a digital news world. The book argues that emergent news values are reordering the fundamental processes of news production. Immediacy, interactivity, and participation now play a role unlike any time before, creating clashes between old and new. These values emerge from the social practices, pressures, and norms at play inside the newsroom as journalists attempt to negotiate the new demands of their work. Immediacy forces journalists to work in a constant deadline environment, an ASAP world, but one where the vaunted traditions of yesterday's news still appear in the next day's print paper. Interactivity, inspired by the new user-computer directed capacities online and the immersive Web environment, brings new kinds of specialists into the newsroom, but exacts new demands upon the already taxed workflow of traditional journalists. And at time where social media presents the opportunity for new kinds of engagement between the audience and media, business executives hope for branding opportunities while journalists fail to truly interact with their readers.

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Making Security Social
Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany
Greg Eghigian
University of Michigan Press, 2000
While welfare has been subject to pronounced criticism throughout the twentieth century, social insurance has consistently enjoyed the overwhelming support of European policy makers and citizens. This volume argues that the emergence of social insurance represents a paradigmatic shift in modern understandings of health, work, political participation, and government. By institutionalizing compensation, social insurance transformed it into a right that the employed population quickly came to assume.
Theoretically informed and based on intensive archival research on disability insurance records, most of which have never been used by historians, the book considers how social science and political philosophy combined to give shape to the idea of a "social" insurance in the nineteenth century; the process by which social insurance gave birth to modern notions of "disability" and "rehabilitation"; and the early-twentieth-century development of political action groups for the disabled.
Most earlier histories of German social insurance have been legislative histories that stressed the system's coercive features and functions. Making Security Social, by contrast, emphasizes the administrative practices of everyday life, the experience of consumers, and the ability of workers not only to resist, but to transform, social insurance bureaucracy and political debate. It thus demonstrates that social insurance was pivotal in establishing a general attitude of demand, claim, and entitlement as the primary link between the modern state and those it governed.
In addition to historians of Germany, Making Security Social will attract researchers across disciplines who are concerned with public policy, disability studies, and public health.
Greg Eghigian is Associate Professor of History, Penn State University.
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Making Sense of the Arab State
Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2024
No region in the world has been more hostile to democracy, more dominated by military and security institutions, or weaker on economic development and inclusive governance than the Middle East. Why have Arab states been so oppressively strong in some areas but so devastatingly weak in others?  How do those patterns affect politics, economics, and society across the region? The state stands at the center of the analysis of politics in the Middle East, but has rarely been the primary focus of systematic theoretical analysis.

Making Sense of the Arab State brings together top scholars from diverse theoretical orientations to address some of the most critically important questions facing the region today. The authors grapple with enduring questions such as the uneven development of state capacity, the failures of developmentalism and governance, the centrality of regime security and survival concerns, the excesses of surveillance and control, and the increasing personalization of power. Making Sense of the Arab State will be a must-read for scholars of the Middle East and of comparative politics more broadly.
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Making the Transition to Classroom Success
Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners
Helaine W. Marshall and Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Features a chapter on flipped classrooms!
 
 Learners with no, minimal, or limited exposure to formal education generally do not share the expectations and assumptions of their new setting; as a result, they are likely to find themselves confounded by the ways in which the language and content are presented, practiced, and assessed in Western-style educational settings. Institutions and teachers must tailor therefore their instruction to this population. Making the Transition to Classroom Success: Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners examines how understanding secondary and adult L2 learners’ educational paradigm, rooted deeply in their past experiences and cultural orientations, provides a key to the solution to a lack of progress.

Making the Transition to Classroom Success builds on and expands on two earlier books, Meeting the Needs of Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Schooling and Breaking New Ground: Teaching Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education in U.S. Secondary Schools.  These previous books focused specifically on a subset of struggling L2 learners--those with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) in U.S. secondary schools—and detailed the instructional model (MALP). Making the Transition broadens the applications of the MALP model to include academic thinking tasks, flipped classrooms, project design, and rubrics.

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Making Waves
Michigan’s Boat-Building Industry, 1865-2000
Scott M. Peters
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Michigan will always be known as the automobile capital of the world, but the Great Lakes State boasts a similarly rich heritage in the development of boat building in America. By the late nineteenth century, Michigan had emerged as the industry’s hub, drawing together the most talented designers, builders, and engine makers to produce some of the fastest and most innovative boats ever created. Within decades, gifted Michigan entrepreneurs like Christopher Columbus Smith, John L. Hacker, and Gar Wood had established some of the nation’s top boat brands and brought the prospect of boat ownership within reach for American consumers from all ranges of income. More than just revolutionizing recreational boating, Michigan boat builders also left their mark on history—from developing the speedy runabouts favored by illicit rum-runners during the Prohibition era to creating the landing craft that carried Allied forces to shores in Europe and the Pacific in WWII. In Making Waves, Scott M. Peters explores this intriguing story of people, processes, and products—of an industry that evolved in Michigan but would change boating across the world.
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Mammals of the Great Lakes Region, 3rd Ed.
Allen Kurta
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Now in an extensively revised 3rd edition, Mammals of the Great Lakes Region has been an essential reference for countless amateur and professional naturalists since 1957. Easily tucked into a backpack and carried into the field, this heavily illustrated guidebook offers detailed information on 83 species, including each mammal’s appearance, behavior, and natural history, along with an explanation of its scientific name. Species accounts are accompanied by new color photographs plus fully updated distribution maps showing the geographic range in the Great Lakes region and in North America.

A thorough introduction outlines the environmental factors that affect the distribution and abundance of mammals in Great Lakes ecosystems and discusses the impacts of current human activities, including introduction of diseases and climate change. There is also a section on preparing captured specimens for research or teaching, as well as user-friendly keys and quick reference tables to physical measurements and life history data. Brand new in this edition, the book also features detailed illustrations of the tracks of commonly found mammals to assist with year-round identification. Providing the most up-to-date information on mammals in the Great Lakes basin, this book belongs on the shelves of teachers, students, naturalists, and professional biologists throughout the region.

 
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Mammographies
The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives
Mary K. DeShazer
University of Michigan Press, 2015

While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction.

Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.

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Mammy
A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders
University of Michigan Press, 2008
"An engaging study of 'mammy,' the provocative figure of the African American nanny, cook, and housekeeper in white households . . . Wallace-Sanders reveals . . . disturbing innuendos of mammy still relevant today, in particular the elevation in value of raising others' children at the expense of one's own."
---Choice

"In this insightful analysis of representations of mammy, Wallace-Sanders skillfully illustrates how this core icon of Black womanhood has figured prominently in upholding hierarchies of race, gender, and class in the United States. Far from being a timeless, natural, benign image of domesticity, the idealized mammy figure was repeatedly reworked to accommodate varying configurations of racial rule. No one reading this book will be able to see Gone with the Wind in the same way ever again."
---Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland

"Kimberly Wallace-Sanders' interdisciplinary approach is first-rate. This expansive and engaging book should appeal to students and scholars in American studies, African American studies, and women's studies."
---Thadious Davis, The University of Pennsylvania

Her cheerful smile and bright eyes gaze out from the covers of old cookbooks, song sheets, syrup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and cookie jars, and she has long been a prominent figure in fiction, film, television, and folk art. She is Mammy, a figure whose provocative hold on the American psyche has persisted since before the Civil War.

But who is Mammy, and where did she come from? Her large, dark body and her round smiling face tower over our imaginations to such an extent that more accurate representations of African American women wither in her shadow. Mammy's stereotypical attributes---a sonorous and soothing voice, raucous laugh, infinite patience, self-deprecating wit, and implicit acceptance of her own inferiority and her devotion to white children---all point to a long-lasting and troubled confluence of racism, sexism, and southern nostalgia.

This groundbreaking book traces the mammy figure and what it has symbolized at various historical moments that are linked to phases in America's racial consciousness. The author shows how representations of Mammy have loomed over the American literary and cultural imagination, an influence so pervasive that only a comprehensive and integrated approach of this kind can do it justice.

The book's many illustrations trace representations of the mammy figure from the nineteenth century to the present, as she has been depicted in advertising, book illustrations, kitchen figurines, and dolls. The author also surveys the rich and previously unmined history of the responses of African American artists to the black mammy stereotype, including contemporary reframings by artists Betye Saar, Michael Ray Charles, and Joyce Scott.

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is Associate Professor of the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and Women's Studies at Emory University. She is editor of Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture.

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Managing "Modernity"
Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia
Rudra Sil
University of Michigan Press, 2002
In Managing "Modernity," Rudra Sil examines how institution-builders respond to the competing influences of institutional models and inherited social legacies as they attempt to generate and sustain authority in late-industrializing societies. Through a historical and comparative study of large-scale enterprises in Japan and Russia, the book examines the impact of different institution-building strategies on managerial authority, invoking the experience of postwar Japan to highlight the benefits of a syncretic approach that selectively integrates adaptable features of borrowed institutions with portable norms inherited from preexisting communities.
Managing "Modernity" engages a variety of intellectual perspectives in the social sciences. The theoretical approach represents a conscious effort to overcome the contentious debates in political science and sociology among proponents of historical institutionalism, cultural analysis, and rational-choice theory. The substantive argument draws on, and partially integrates, concepts and findings from comparative politics, economic sociology, industrial relations, organization theory, business management, and the political economy of Japan and Russia.
In light of ongoing debates over the significance and impact of "globalization," the eclectic and integrative approach in Managing "Modernity" offers a fresh and provocative contribution that will interest scholars and graduate students across a variety of disciplines and subfields. It offers compelling insights to anyone generally concerned with the social forces that facilitate or hinder the diffusion of ideas and institutions across national boundaries.
Rudra Sil is Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania.
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Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk
Fertility and Danger in West Central Tanzania
Denise Roth Allen
University of Michigan Press, 2004

In Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk, Denise Roth Allen persuasively argues that development interventions in the Third World often have unintended and unacknowledged consequences. Based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania, this rich and engaging ethnography of women's fertility-related experiences highlights the processes by which a set of seemingly well-intentioned international maternal health policy recommendations go awry when implemented at the local level.

An exploration of how threats to maternal health have been defined and addressed at the global, national, and local levels, Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk presents two contrasting, and oftentimes competing, definitions of risk: those that form the basis of international recommendations and national maternal health policies and those that do not. The effect that these contrasting definitions of risk have on women's fertility-related experiences at the local level are explored throughout the book.

This study employs an innovative approach to the analysis of maternal health risk, one that situates rural Tanzanian women's fertility-related experiences within a broader historical and sociocultural context. Beginning with an examination of how maternal health risk was defined and addressed during the early years of British colonial rule in Tanganyika and moving to a discussion of an internationally conceived maternal health initiative that was launched on the world stage in the late 1980s, the author explores the similarities in the language used and solutions proposed by health development experts over time.

This set of "official" maternal health risks is then compared to an alternative set of risks that emerge when attention is focused on women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth at the local level. Although some of these latter risks are often spoken about as deriving from spiritual or supernatural causes, the case studies presented throughout the second half of the book reveal that the concept of risk in the context of pregnancy and childbirth is much more complex, involving the interplay of spiritual, physical, and economic aspects of everyday life.

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Managing Readers
Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books
William W. E. Slights
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Managing Readers explores the fascinating interchange between text and margin, authorship and readership in early modern England. Printed marginalia did more than any other material feature of book production in the period between 1540 and 1700 to shape the experience of reading. William W. E. Slights considers overlooked evidence of the ways that early modern readers were instructed to process information, to contest opinions, and to make themselves into fully responsive consumers of texts.
The recent revolution in the protocols of reading brought on by computer technology has forced questions about the nature of book-based knowledge in our global culture. Managing Readers traces changes in the protocols of annotation and directed reading--from medieval religious manuscripts and Renaissance handbooks for explorers, rhetoricians, and politicians to the elegant clear-text editions of the Enlightenment and the hypertexts of our own time. Developing such concepts as textual authority, generic difference, and reader-response, Slights demonstrates that printed marginalia were used to confirm the authority of the text and to undermine it, to supplement "dark" passages, and to colonize strategic hermeneutic spaces. The book contains twenty-two illustrations of pages from rare-book archives that make immediately clear how distinctive the management of the reading experience was during the first century-and-a-half of printing in England.
William W. E. Slights is Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan. He is also author of Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy.
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The Mandarin and the Cadre
China’s Political Cultures
Lucian W. Pye
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Combining political psychology with his own insights into Chinese culture, Pye addresses perplexing but profoundly important questions about Chinese political behavior and makes fundamental contributions both to our understanding of the political culture of China and to the theory of political culture itself.
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Manifesto for the Humanities
Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times
Sidonie Smith
University of Michigan Press, 2015
After a remarkable career in higher education, Sidonie Smith offers Manifesto for the Humanities as a reflective contribution to the current academic conversation over the place of the Humanities in the 21st century. Her focus is on doctoral education and opportunities she sees for its reform.
 
Grounding this manifesto in background factors contributing to current “crises” in the humanities, Smith advocates for a 21st century doctoral education responsive to the changing ecology of humanistic scholarship and teaching. She elaborates a more expansive conceptualization of coursework and dissertation, a more robust, engaged public humanities, and a more diverse, collaborative, and networked sociality.
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Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton
University of Michigan Press, 1969
Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism
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Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West
Arthur E.R. Boak
University of Michigan Press, 1955
In Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Arthur E. R. Boak, applying to population trends in antiquity the methods worked out by modern demographers, shows that there was a real and general decline in both rural and town population of the Roman Empire in the West from the middle of the second century on; that the Late Empire was from its beginnings faced with a marked deficiency in human resources; and that this manpower shortage was the cause—not, as has been held, the consequence—of much that has been considered authoritarian in the administration of Late Rome. This analysis throws new light on the economic and social legislation of Diocletian, Constantine I, and their successors. As the first detailed picture of the population policies of the Western Empire, and their effects on its government service, the study concerns economists and sociologists as well as historians and classicists.
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Man's Nature and Nature's Man
The Ecology of Human Communities
Lee R. Dice
University of Michigan Press, 1955
In Man's Nature and Nature's Man, Lee R. Dice tells of the interrelationship of man in his communities, of his plant and animal associates, and of how they act one upon the other. He describes the laws that govern their rise and decline, and the regulatory mechanisms set up by nature and by man himself that promote human progress. He deals with the dynamics of human populations, and with the philosophical and moral bases of human communities. Finally, he casts his eye upon the prospects before us. "A series of well-regulated world communities," he writes, "is not likely to be constructed soon nor without tremendous effort and travail. Nevertheless, the evolutionary trend is in that direction. Selfishness, ignorance, and bigotry may delay the discovery and application of these principles. But no force will be able to prevent the evolution of world communities which will continually advance toward ever higher levels of culture. If effective efforts are made to discover and apply the natural laws that affect human affairs, the time required can be greatly shortened. Our future is in our own hands."
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The Many Faces of Political Islam
Religion and Politics in the Muslim World
Mohammed Ayoob
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Mohammed Ayoob's The Many Faces of Political Islam thoroughly describes the myriad manifestations of this rising ideology and analyzes its impact on global relations.
"In this beautifully crafted and utterly compelling book, Mohammed Ayoob accomplishes admirably the difficult task of offering a readily accessible yet nuanced and comprehensive analysis of an issue of enormous political importance. Both students and specialists will learn a great deal from this absolutely first-rate book."
---Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow, Cornell University
"Dr. Ayoob addresses the nuances and complexities of political Islam---be it mainstream, radical, or militant---and offers a road map of the pivotal players and issues that define the movement. There is no one as qualified as Mohammed Ayoob to write a synthesis of various manifestations of political Islam. His complex narrative highlights the changes and shifts that have taken place within the Islamist universe and their implications for internal Muslim politics and relations between the world of Islam and the Christian world."
---Fawaz A. Gerges, Carnegie Scholar, and holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies, Sarah Lawrence College
"Let's hope that many readers---not only academics but policymakers as well---will use this invaluable book."
---François Burgat, Director, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Institute for Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim World (IREMAM), Aix-en-Provence, France
"This is a wonderful, concise book by an accomplished and sophisticated political scientist who nonetheless manages to convey his interpretation of complex issues and movements to even those who have little background on the subject. It is impressive in its clarity, providing a badly needed text on political Islam that's accessible to college students and the general public alike."
---Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, University of Maryland, and Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations with a joint appointment in James Madison College and the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. He is also Coordinator of the Muslim Studies Program at Michigan State University.
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front cover of The Many Faces of Political Islam, Second Edition
The Many Faces of Political Islam, Second Edition
Religion and Politics in Muslim Societies
Mohammed Ayoob and Danielle N. Lussier
University of Michigan Press, 2020

Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Fully revised and updated, The Many Faces of Political Islam thoroughly analyzes the many facets of this political ideology and shows its impact on global relations.

 

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The Many Faces of Strategic Voting
Tactical Behavior in Electoral Systems Around the World
Laura B. Stephenson, John H. Aldrich, and André Blais, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Voters do not always choose their preferred candidate on election day. Often they cast their ballots to prevent a particular outcome, as when their own preferred candidate has no hope of winning and they want to prevent another, undesirable candidate’s victory; or, they vote to promote a single-party majority in parliamentary systems, when their own candidate is from a party that has no hope of winning. In their thought-provoking book The Many Faces of Strategic Voting, Laura B. Stephenson, John H. Aldrich, and André Blais first provide a conceptual framework for understanding why people vote strategically, and what the differences are between sincere and strategic voting behaviors. Expert contributors then explore the many facets of strategic voting through case studies in Great Britain, Spain, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the European Union.

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Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”
A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary
Bonnie S. McDougall
University of Michigan Press, 1980
The writings of Mao Zedong have been circulated throughout the world more widely, perhaps, than those of any other single person this century. The “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” has occupied a prominent position among his many works and has been the subject of intense scrutiny both within and outside China. This text has undoubted importance to modern Chinese literature and history. In particular, it reveals Mao’s views on such questions as the relationship between writers or works of literature and their audience, or the nature and value of different kinds of literary products.
In this translation and commentary, Bonnie S. McDougall finds that Mao was in fact ahead of many of his critics in the West and his Chinese contemporaries in his discussion of literary issues. Unlike the majority of modern Chinese writers deeply influenced by Western theories of literature and society (including Marxism), Mao remained close to traditional patterns of thought and avoided the often mechanical or narrowly literal interpretations that were the hallmark of Western schools current in China in the early twentieth century.
Many of the detailed discussions on the “Talks” in the West have been concerned with their political and historical significance. However, since Mao is a literary figure of some importance in twentieth-century China, McDougall finds it worthwhile to follow up his published remarks on the nature and source of literature and the means of its evaluation. By better understanding the complex and revolutionary ideas contained in the “Talks,” McDougall suggests we may acquire the necessary analytical tools for a more fruitful investigation into contemporary Chinese literature.
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Mapping Michel Serres
Niran Abbas, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"Provides an extremely valuable introduction to the work of Michel Serres for an English-speaking audience, as well as offering useful critical approaches for those already familiar with its outlines."
---Robert Harrison, Stanford University [blurb from review pending permission]

The work of Michel Serres---including the books Hermes, The Parasite, The Natural Contract, Genesis, The Troubadour of Knowledge, and Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time---has stimulated readers for years, as it challenges the boundaries of science, literature, culture, language, and epistemology. The essays in Mapping Michel Serres, written by the leading interpreters of his work, offer perspectives from a range of disciplinary positions, including literature, language studies, and cultural theory. Contributors include Maria Assad, Hanjo Berressem, Stephen Clucas, Steven Connor, Andrew Gibson, René Girard, Paul Harris, Marcel Hénaff, William Johnsen, William Paulson, Marjorie Perloff, Philipp Schweighauser, Isabella Winkler, and Julian Yates.
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The March Up Country
A Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis
Xenophon
University of Michigan Press, 1957

In 401 B.C. the Middle East was as much the center of the world attention as it is today. Ten thousand Greeks joined the army of Cyros marching on Babylon to overthrow the great King of the Persians, Artaxerxes. Among the Greeks was an Athenian gentleman, Xenophon, who went along as a sightseer but soon found himself cast in the main role.

At Cunaxa, Cyros' forces met and resoundingly defeated the tremendous army of the King, but Cyros was killed while leading the attack. Stranded a thousand miles from home, the Greeks chose Xenophon as their new leader. The wealthy Athenian squire rose to the challenge. Using every trick of the pioneer in hostile territory, he brought his men back to safety. The March Up Country is a classic of courage and adventure.

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Margaret Webster
A Life in the Theater
Milly S. Barranger
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it."
-Marian Seldes

"Margaret Webster is a highly welcome addition to our knowledge of the first important female director in American theater. Remembered now especially for her staging of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, Margaret Webster was probably the best-known, in-demand, and admired director of Shakespeare in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Fascinating throughout, the book's discussions of working with Robeson, and of HUAC, which targeted her just as her career was reaching a peak, make for especially engrossing reading."
-Oscar Brockett


Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater is an engrossing backstage account of the life of pioneering director Margaret Webster (1905-72).

This is the first book-length biography of Webster, a groundbreaking stage and opera director whose career challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women.

Often credited with first having brought Shakespeare to Broadway, and renowned for her bold casting of an African American (Paul Robeson) in the role of Othello, Webster was a creative force in modern American and British theater.

Her story reveals the independent-minded artist undeterred by stage tradition and unmindful of rules about a woman's place in the professional theater. In addition to providing fascinating glimpses into Webster's personal and family life, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater also offers a who's-who list of the biggest names in New York and London theater of the time, as well as Hollywood: John Gielgud, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Uta Hagen, Sybil Thorndike, Eva LeGallienne, and John Barrymore, among others, all of whom crossed paths with Webster. Capping Webster's amazing story is her investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, which left her unable to work for a year, and from which she never fully recovered.

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Marginal People in Deviant Places
Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism
Janice M. Irvine
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.
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The Margins of the Text
D. C. Greetham, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997
These days, the margins have become a powerful position from which to mount a critique of contemporary society, culture, and text. From gay and lesbian studies to postcolonial or "subaltern" criticism, formerly marginalized perspectives have brought provocative new insights into many fields of inquiry. But until comparatively recently, the extremely powerful, even culture-defining, discourse of textual editing has been immune to such influences.
The Margins of the Text is the first attempt to collect a body of essays concerned with specific aspects of the marginal as they relate to text. The volume is divided into two sections. The first part assembles essays concerned with the margins of textual discourse and explores the function of discourses not previously recognized as significant to scholarly editing, such as those of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The second section attends to the textual margins in the bibliographical sense--the margins of the book, in which there has been so much recent interest. The two parts of the collection are clearly interrelated, since both study the effects of margins as a form of cultural discourse.
As a whole, the collection spans several periods (medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth-century to modern), several disciplines (drama, literature, art history, politics, and philosophy), and offers a wide-ranging consideration of a single topic as it is manifested in various genres, formats, and media. The contributors are among the most respected textual/critical theorists in their fields.
The Margins of the Text will become a standard reference in the field, and will be read profitably by culture critics and social historians as well as textual critics and editors.
D. C. Greetham is Professor of English and Medieval Studies, City University of New York Graduate School.
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Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson
The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint
Kirstin Hotelling Zona
University of Michigan Press, 2002
This book examines the strategic possibilities of poetic self-restraint. Marianne Moore,Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson all wrote poetry that is marked by a certain reserve--precisely the motive against which most feminist poets and critics of the last thirty years have established themselves. Kirstin Hotelling Zona complicates this dichotomy by examining the conceptions of selfhood upon which it depends. She argues that Moore, Bishop, and Swenson expressed their commitment to feminism by exposing its most treasured assumptions: they not only challenge the ideal of autonomous self-definition, but also contest the integrity of a bodily or sexual authenticity by which that ideal is often measured.
In recent years critical studies of Bishop and Moore have flourished, a large percentage of them devoted to explorations of sexuality and gender. A gap is growing, however, between feminist repossessions of Moore and Bishop and recent readings of their antiessentialist poetics. On the one hand, these poets are appearing more frequently in the feminist canon, but the price of this inclusion is usually the suppression of their strategies of self-restraint. While Zona questions the poetic privileging of self-expression, she establishes contiguity between feminist poetry and developments in American poetry at large. In doing so she asserts the centrality of feminist poetry within discussions of contemporary American poetry, thereby challenging the common perception of feminist poetry as an "alternative" (which often means auxiliary) genre.
Kirstin Hotelling Zona is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Illinois State University.
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Mark One or More
Civil Rights in Multiracial America
Kim M. Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Mark One or More tells the little-known story of the struggle to include a multiracial category on the U.S. census, and the profound changes it wrought in the American political landscape.

The movement to add a multiracial category to the 2000 U.S. Census provoked unprecedented debates about race. The effort made for strange bedfellows. Republicans like House Speaker Newt Gingrich and affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly took up the multiracial cause. Civil rights leaders opposed the movement on the premise that it had the potential to dilute the census count of traditional minority groups. The activists themselves—a loose confederation of organizations, many led by the white mothers of interracial children—wanted recognition. What they got was the transformation of racial politics in America.

Mark One or More is the compelling account of how this small movement sparked a big change, and a moving call to reassess the meaning of racial identity in American life.

Kim M. Williams is Associate Professor of Public Policy in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and an expert in racial and ethnic politics and political movements.
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Market Dreams
Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic
Elaine Weiner
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Drawing on a rich trove of focus group data, interviews, and textual sources, Elaine Weiner's Market Dreams powerfully captures the varied responses of female managers and factory workers in the Czech Republic to their country's transition from socialism to capitalism. Her work, rooted in sociology and comparative feminism, is an important advance for the literature on women in Eastern Europe.

"Market Dreams is a conceptually-sophisticated and empirically-rich account of how the discourses and practices of the free market penetrated the hearts and minds of everyday Czech citizens. Weiner's provocative analysis takes readers inside the worlds of female factory workers to expose the discontinuities between their radiant market dreams and their everyday realities--and juxtaposes them to the continuities experienced by female managers. In the process, it challenges many of our ideas about post/socialism, marketization, and gender and reveals the enduring power of stories in shaping social identities and actions."
---Lynne Haney, Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University

"Through interviews and a careful analysis of newspaper articles written in the first decade after the collapse of state socialism, Weiner explores the complicated interconnections between personal stories and the emerging neoliberal metanarrative of the free market in the Czech Republic after 1989. Her book transcends many of the dichotomies with which researchers of post-state socialism have been struggling: 'East' vs. 'West,' losers and winners, emancipation vs. oppression, etc., and thus makes a truly novel contribution to our understanding of women's lives after state socialism."
---Éva Fodor, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, Central European University

"Weiner's rich and innovative study of female Czech managers and workers exemplifies the importance of narrative analysis for understanding why gender and class have not (yet) reconfigured the sense of postcommunism's alternatives. This is critical reading for feminists, class analysts, and students of postcommunist social change."
---Michael Kennedy, Director, Center for European Studies, University of Michigan

Elaine Weiner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Visit the author's website at: www.mcgill.ca/sociology/faculty/weiner/.

Cover Credit: Frank Scherschel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

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Market-Augmenting Government
The Institutional Foundations for Prosperity
Omar Azfar and Charles A. Cadwell, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2003
As recently as 1990 policymakers and academics believed widely that all that was needed for dramatic increases in prosperity in transitional economies was to roll back the state. The arguments in this book present an articulate antidote to that assertion: While the state must withdraw from many activities involving direct production and exchange, it must provide good laws and enforce them for economies to prosper. In one chapter, Robert Summers brilliantly exposes the complexity of this requirement, listing eighteen minimum conditions for the creation of the rule of law. Other chapters describe the benefits of good commercial law on economic growth, the political foundations of American commercial law, how poor governance led to the Asian financial crisis, the institutional requirements for environmental markets, and constitutional structures that lead to efficient government.
The contributors, renowned experts in their fields on the complex institutional requirements for prosperity, offer arguments from economic theory, economic history, legal theory, and political science. The chapters are simultaneously of high scholarly quality and intensely applicable. Indeed many of the ideas here are being used to design reform projects in developing countries.
Market-Augmenting Government will appeal to legal theorists, economists, and political scientists, and in particular to institutional economists. Its writing is friendly to the general reader, with only a few of the chapters requiring specialized knowledge. The book will also figure importantly in policy circles as governance moves center stage in the practice of reform and development.
Omar Azfar is Research Associate, IRIS Center, University of Maryland, College Park. Charles A. Cadwell is Director and Principle Investigator, IRIS Center, University of Maryland, College Park.
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Marketing Modernisms
Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading
Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Rarely have genres of literary expression been looked upon or read as commodities within a market system; we tend to think of our literature as "pure," untainted by any interaction with the world of commerce. Critical accounts of modernism are frequently theorized across the divide between the project itself and the larger marketplace, the world of consumption. Marketing Modernisms calls into question this curious separation and examines the material, intellectual, and ideological practices that comprise the notion of "marketing." Marketing Modernisms is concerned with Anglo-American modernists and their potential readers in both the popular audience and the academy. Examining the forms of promotion employed by book publishing houses, in the editorial offices of literary magazines, and in the minds of modern writers, the essays bring to the fore little-known connections between writers such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Langston Hughes, and the commercial marketplace they engaged. The book's provocative themes include the strategies that modernists and their publishers employed to market their work, to fashion themselves as artists or celebrities, and to bridge the gap between an avant-garde elite and the popular reader. Other essays explore the difficulties confronted by women, African American, and gay and lesbian writers in gaining literary acceptance and achieving commercial representation while maintaining the gendered, racial, and sexual aspects of their lives.
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Markets and Cultural Voices
Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters
Tyler Cowen
University of Michigan Press, 2005
This intriguing work explores the world of three amate artists. A native tradition, all of their painting is done in Mexico, yet, the finished product is sold almost exclusively to wealthy American art buyers.

Cowen examines this cultural interaction between Mexico and the United States to see how globalization shapes the lives and the work of the artists and their families. The story of these three artists reveals that this exchange simultaneously creates economic opportunities for the artists, but has detrimental effects on the village.

A view of the daily village life of three artists connected to the larger art world, this book should be of particular interest to those in the fields of cultural economics, Latino studies, economic anthropology and globalization.
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Markets and Medicine
The Politics of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States
Susan Giaimo
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Are advanced industrialized countries converging on a market response to reform their systems of social protection? By comparing the health care reform experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States in the 1990s, Susan Giaimo explores how countries pursue diverse policy responses and how such variations reflect distinctive institutions, actors, and reform politics in each country.
In Britain, the Thatcher government's plan to inject a market into the state-administered national health service resulted in a circumscribed experiment orchestrated from above. In Germany, the Kohl government sought to repair defects in the corporatist arrangement with doctors and insurers, thus limiting the market experiment and designing it to enhance the solidarity of the national health insurance system. In the United States, private market actors foiled Clinton's bid to expand the federal government's role in the private health care system through managed competition and national insurance. But market reform continued, albeit led by private employers and with government officials playing a reactive role. Actors and institutions surrounding the existing health care settlement in each country created particular reform politics that either militated against or fostered the deployment of competition.
The finding that major transformations are occurring in private as well as public systems of social protection suggests that studies of social policy change expand their focus beyond statutory welfare state programs. The book will interest political scientists and policymakers concerned with welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies; social scientists interested in the changing balance among state, market, and societal interests in governance; and health policy researchers, health policymakers, and health care professionals.
Susan Giaimo is an independent scholar. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also earned an MSc in Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, with the Politics and Government of Western Europe as the branch of study. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, University of California at Berkeley, and the Robert Bosch Foundation Scholars Program in Comparative Public Policy and Comparative Institutions, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She taught in the Political Science Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for five years. During that period she won the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Founder's Prize for "Adapting the Welfare State: The Case of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States," a paper she coauthored with Philip Manow. She has also worked for health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and medical practices in the United States.
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Marking Modern Movement
Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic
Susan Funkenstein
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Imagine yourself in Weimar Germany: you are visually inundated with depictions of dance.  Perusing a women’s magazine, you find photograph after photograph of leggy revue starlets, clad in sequins and feathers, coquettishly smiling at you.  When you attend an art exhibition, you encounter Otto Dix’s six-foot-tall triptych Metropolis, featuring Charleston dancers in the latest luxurious fashions, or Emil Nolde’s watercolors of Mary Wigman, with their luminous blues and purples evoking her choreographies’ mystery and expressivity.  Invited to the Bauhaus, you participate in the Metallic Festival, and witness the school’s transformation into a humorous, shiny, technological total work of art; you costume yourself by strapping a metal plate to your head, admire your reflection in the tin balls hanging from the ceiling, and dance the Bauhaus’ signature step in which you vigorously hop and stomp late into the night.
 
Yet behind the razzle dazzle of these depictions and experiences was one far more complex involving issues of gender and the body during a tumultuous period in history, Germany’s first democracy (1918-1933).  Rather than mere titillation, the images copiously illustrated and analyzed in Marking Modern Movement illuminate how visual artists and dancers befriended one another and collaborated together.  In many ways because of these bonds, artists and dancers forged a new path in which images revealed artists’ deep understanding of dance, their dynamic engagement with popular culture, and out of that, a possibility of representing women dancers as cultural authorities to be respected.  Through six case studies, Marking Modern Movement explores how and why these complex dynamics occurred in ways specific to their historical moment.
 
Extensively illustrated and with color plates, Marking Modern Movement is a clearly written book accessible to general readers and undergraduates. Coming at a time of a growing number of major art museums showcasing large-scale exhibitions on images of dance, the audience exists for a substantial general-public interest in this topic.  Conversing across German studies, art history, dance studies, gender studies, and popular culture studies, Marking Modern Movement is intended to engage readers coming from a wide range of perspectives and interests.
 
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Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society
Verena Martinez-Alier
University of Michigan Press, 1989
Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba challenges conventional ideas about the roots of Cuban race relations. Verena Martinez-Alier proposes a relational model for the study of sexual values and social inequality. She deals with Cuban notions of honor and virtue while describing complex interconnections between class and perceived racial status that determined the choice of sexual and marriage partners. First published in 1974, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba is now a classic, a pathbreaking encounter of anthropology with history that points the way for future investigations. With this edition, the work of this pioneering scholar is made available again, with a new introduction by the author.
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A Martian Muse
Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
Reginald Shepherd
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Those who have read Orpheus in the Bronx, Reginald Shepherd's previous collection of essays about the act of creating poetry, and those who take on the task, can immediately understand why it was a national finalist for a prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. Shepherd was candid and disarming, practical and funny, able to mix thoughts about the Transformers with meditations on the realities of growing up poor.

This is Reginald Shepherd's final opportunity to speak his mind about the craft he loved, the art of using words to express the soul and the wit of every person's experience. Edited by Shepherd's longtime partner and intellectual confidant, Robert Philen, A Martian Muse stands as a final monument to a master in the craft, but is also a readable, important work in its own right.

"Reginald Shepherd died September 10, 2008, after a hard struggle with cancer. While he had completed the essays presented here and had selected them from his available essays to form a collection, he didn't have time to organize the presentation of the essays within the collection.

"The task of editing this collection has been a daunting challenge as I struggle to live up to the level of intellectual engagement, clarity, and coherence that Reginald always expected. While daunting, it has also been a labor of love and a compulsion for me, based on the many years I spent with him as a partner, friend, lover, intellectual companion, and sharer of common passions."
---Robert Philen, from the Introduction

Reginald Shepherd was the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries and the author of five books of poetry. He was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and was the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Florida Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation, among many other awards and honors.

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The Martian's Daughter
A Memoir
Marina von Neumann Whitman
University of Michigan Press, 2013

One of the five Hungarian scientific geniuses dubbed "the Martians" by their colleagues, John von Neumann is often hailed as the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and even as the greatest scientist after Einstein. He was a key figure in the Manhattan Project; the inventor of game theory; the pioneer developer of the modern stored-program electronic computer; and an adviser to the top echelons of the American military establishment. In The Martian's Daughter, Marina von Neumann Whitman reveals intimate details about the famed scientist and explores how the cosmopolitan environment in which she was immersed, the demanding expectations of her parents, and her own struggles to emerge from the shadow of a larger-than-life parent shaped her life and work.

Unfortunately, von Neumann did not live to see his daughter rise to become the first or highest-ranking woman in a variety of arenas. Whitman became a noted academic during the 1960s and '70s, casting her teaching and writing in the framework of globalization before the word had been invented; became the first woman ever to serve on the President's Council of Economic Advisers and participated actively in U.S. efforts to reshape the international monetary and financial system during the early 1970s; pioneered the role of women on the boards of leading multinational corporations; and became the highest-ranking female executive in the American auto industry in the 1980s. In her memoir, Whitman quotes from personal letters from her father and describes her interactions with such figures as Roger Smith of GM and President Nixon. She also details the difficulties she encountered as an early entrant into a world dominated by men and how she overcame the obstacles to, in her words, "have it all."

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Martin Luther King
Godfrey Hodgson
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is as relevant today as he was when he led civil rights campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. He was an agent and a prophet of political change in this country, and the election of President Barack Obama is his direct legacy.

Now from one of Britain's most experienced political observers comes a new, accessible biography of the man and his works. The story of King is dramatic, and Godfrey Hodgson presents it with verve, clarity, and acute insight based in part on his own reporting on-scene at the time. He interviewed King half a dozen times or more; heard his speech at the March on Washington; was in Birmingham, Selma and Chicago; and met many of the characters in King's life story. Martin Luther King combines the best of his own reporting, plus the work of other biographers and researchers, to trace the iconic civil rights leader's career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Hodgson sheds light on every aspect of an extraordinary life: the Black Baptist culture in which King grew up, his theology and political philosophy, his physical and moral courage, his insistence on the injustice of inequality, his campaigning energy, his repeated sexual infidelities.

Hodgson describes the political minefield in which King operated; follows how he gradually persuaded President Kennedy that he could not stand by and allow the civil rights movement to be frustrated; and describes how, on the verge of success, his career was threatened by President Johnson's anger at King's principled decision to come out against the Vietnam War. He also puts King's career into the context of American history in the crisis of the 1960s. In his life, King was frustrated; but in death, he has been triumphant.

Martin Luther King allows the charisma and power of King's personality to shine through, showing in gripping narrative style exactly how one man helped America to progress toward its truest ideals. Hodgson's extensive research and detail help paint an accurate, complex portrait of one of America's most important leaders.

Godfrey Hodgson has worked in Britain and America as a newspaper and magazine journalist; as a television reporter, documentary maker and anchor; as a university teacher and lecturer; and as the author of a dozen well-received books about U.S. politics and recent history, including America in Our Time, a history of the United States in the 1960s; More Equal than Others, on politics and society in twentieth-century America; and most recently, a biography of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York. Hodgson met King on a number of occasions between 1956 and 1967. He recently retired as director of the Reuters Foundation Programme at Oxford University and is a visiting journalism professor at City University in London.

PRAISE FOR America in Our Time

"A critique so stimulating and compelling that I can only say read it."
---Richard Lingeman, The New York Times

"It simply gets right, without great fuss, the detail and proportion of things like the civil rights movement, student unrest, the stages of our Vietnam engagement."
---Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books

PRAISE FOR More Equal than Others

"The most thoughtful, thorough and sorrowful book imaginable on what has happened in these years."
---Bernard Crick, The Independent

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front cover of Marx Went Away--But Karl Stayed Behind
Marx Went Away--But Karl Stayed Behind
Caroline Humphrey
University of Michigan Press, 1999
When it appeared in 1983, Caroline Humphrey's Karl Marx Collective was the first detailed study of the Soviet collective farm system. Through careful ethnographic work on two collective farms operated in Buryat communities in Siberia, the author presented an absorbing--if dispiriting--account of the actual functioning of a planned economy at the local level.
Now this classic work is back in print in a revised edition that adds new material from the author's most recent research in the former Soviet Union. In two new chapters she documents what has happened to the two farms in the collapsing Russian economy. She finds that collective farms are still the dominant agricultural forms, not out of nostalgic sentiment or loyalty to the Soviet ideal, but from economic and political necessity.
Today the collectives are based on households and small groups coming together out of choice. There have been important resurgences in "traditional" thinking about kinship, genealogy, shamanism and mountain cults; and yet all of this is newly formed by its attempt to deal with post-Soviet realities.
Marx Went Away will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology.
"The book should be on the shelf of every student of Soviet affairs." --Times Literary Supplement
Caroline Humphrey is Fellow of King's College and Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
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Mary Schafer, American Quilt Maker
Gwen Marston
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Extensively illustrated, with over 100 drawings and 11 unique Mary Schafer patterns, Mary Schafer, American Quilt Maker is a must-have book for anyone passionate about American quilting.

While we take that passion for granted today, author Gwen Marston shows that it wasn't always so; indeed, one woman, Mary Schafer, was largely responsible for the restoration of interest in one of our greatest folk arts -- long before the American bicentennial turned quilting into what seemed like an overnight sensation.

Marston presents Schafer as an unassuming scholar: the anonymous quilter, remaining humble and somewhat retiring. Behind the modest façade, however, Schafer displayed a remarkable devotion to research, historical accuracy, and community through her efforts to make quilting available to as many people as possible.

Nonquilters will find Mary Schafer, American Quilt Maker a welcome addition to their collection of the work of masters of American folk art, while quilting aficionados will appreciate it not only for the story it tells, but for the generous selection of patterns and illustrations it offers.

Gwen Marston is a nationally known quilt maker, teacher, and author. She is the author of over fifteen books on quilting, including Liberated String Quilts, 70 Classic Quilting Patterns, and Amish Quilting Patterns.

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front cover of Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery
Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery
Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea
Eric Kline Silverman
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery analyzes the relationship between masculinity and motherhood in an Eastern Iatmul village along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. It focuses on a metaphorical dialogue between two countervailing images of the body, dubbed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as the "moral" and the "grotesque." Eastern Iatmul men in Tambunum village idealize an image of motherhood that is nurturing, sheltering, cleansing, fertile, and chaste--in a word, moral. But men also fear an equally compelling image of motherhood that is defiling, dangerous, orificial, aggressive, and carnal--hence, grotesque. Masculinity in Tambunum is a rejoinder both subtle and strident, both muted and impassioned, to these contrary, embodied images of motherhood.
Throughout this work, Eric Silverman details the dialogics of mothering and manhood throughout Eastern Iatmul culture, including in his analysis cosmology and myth; food- and childraising; architecture and canoes; ethnophysiology and sexuality; shame and hygiene; marriage and kinship; and perhaps most significantly, a ceremonial locus classicus in anthropology: the famous Iatmul naven rite. This book provides the first sustained examination of naven since Bateson, presenting new data and interpretations that are based entirely on original, first-hand ethnographic research.
The sustained engagement with anthropological and psychoanalytic theory coupled with a refreshing examination of a famous and still-enigmatic ritual is sure to make multiple contributions to pressing debates in contemporary anthropology and social theory.
Eric Silverman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, DePauw University.
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The Mask of the Parasite
A Pathology of Roman Patronage
Cynthia Damon
University of Michigan Press, 1997
When Romans applied the term "parasite" to contemporaries in dependent circumstances, or clientes, they were evoking one of the stock characters of ancient Greek comedy. In the Roman world the parasite was moved out of his native genre into the literatures of invective and social criticism, where his Greek origins made him a uniquely useful transmitter of Roman perceptions. Whenever the figure of the parasite is used to mask a person in Roman society, we know that an effort of interpretation is underway. The fit between the mask and its wearer is in the eyes of the beholder, and in Rome the mask seemed to fit people in many different situations: entrepreneurs, tax-farmers, lawyers, female companions, philosophers, and poets.
In The Mask of the Parasite, Cynthia Damon maintains that the parasite of Latin literature is a negative reflection of the cliens. In Part One she assembles a composite picture of the comic parasite using as evidence fragments of Greek comedy, works from Greek writers of the imperial period whose works reflect the comic tradition, and the ten complete plays of Roman comedy in which a parasite appears. In parts two and three she examines the ways in which Cicero and the satirists use the figure of the parasite: Cicero in belittling his opponents in court, Horace and Martial in creating a negative foil for the poeta cliens, Juvenal in painting contemporary patron/client relationships as morally and spiritually bankrupt.
The Mask of the Parasite is a fascinating study of the intersection of literature and society in ancient Rome. However, neither the parasite nor patronage is confined to the Roman world. Students of classical studies as well as students of literature and cultural studies will find this to be a work of utmost importance in understanding these complex issues of human interaction.
Cynthia Damon is Assistant Professor of Classics, Amherst College
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front cover of Mass–Elite Representation Gap in Old and New Democracies
Mass–Elite Representation Gap in Old and New Democracies
Critical Junctures and Elite Agency
Edited by Jaemin Shim
University of Michigan Press, 2024
What happens when voters and their representatives don’t agree?
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Mastering Academic Reading
Lawrence J. Zwier with contributions by Matthew S. Weltig
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Mastering Academic Reading is meant to challenge advanced academically oriented students of English. The units and the readings within them are long. The comprehension and expansion exercises after them are demanding. The hoped-for outcome is that students trained using this textbook will be able to better hold their own in university classes where the reading volume across disciplines and vocabulary demands are high.

Almost every reading is taken, in minimally adapted form, from a book or academic / professional journal. Two introductory passages have been composed expressly for this book in order to provide narrowly focused background material. Beyond these pieces, readers are in the hands of “real-world” authors and their difficult, lexically diffuse, and allusion-filled creations. Journal articles and book excerpts predominate, but Mastering Academic Reading also offers  a book review and a government pamphlet as well.

Since one aspect of reading practice builds on others, the units are laid out in tiers, not in sections. Each unit has been organized into three tiers. In general, there is one reading per tier, although the first tier in Unit 3 contains two passages (both necessary to provide conceptual background for the other two tiers). Each reading is 3,500-5,000 words. The book focuses on the three primary goals of academic reading: reading to learn; reading to integrate, write, and critique texts; and reading for basic comprehension.

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Materia Magica
The Archaeology of Magic in Roman Egypt, Cyprus, and Spain
Andrew T. Wilburn
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Materia Magica approaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite. Through case studies drawing on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites, Andrew T. Wilburn identifies previously unknown forms of magic. He discovers evidence of the practice of magic in objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in times of crises.

Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn examines the material remains of magical practice by identifying and placing them within their archaeological contexts. His method of connecting an analysis of the texts and inscriptions found on artifacts of magic with a close consideration of the physical form of these objects illuminates an exciting path toward new discoveries in the field.

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Material Witness
The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter
Ted Leigh, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"The publication of Porter's letters marks an occasion for a renewed celebration of his painting and an appreciation of his quirky, indeed ornery, personality. Porter was a feisty correspondent, who fearlessly entered the intellectual discourse of his time."
---From the introduction by David Lehman

"In this lifetime of letters, Fairfield Porter reveals the complexity and passion of a protagonist in a novel by Dostoevsky or Henry James."
---Jane Freilicher

Fairfield Porter (1907-75) has been called by poet John Ashbery "perhaps the major American artist of the century." He was also known as a gifted art critic.

Beyond shedding light on his personal views, this collection of Fairfield Porter's letters demonstrates his profound contribution to American art and literature and displays his acumen as a political critic. The letters tell the story of a reserved artist and intellectual, torn between the tensions and pressures he felt among politics, family life, and painting-a man who forged a painting style outside the politically correct artistic perceptions of both left and right.

The collection includes letters from Porter's early travels to the Soviet Union, including a description of an interview with Trotsky, as well as some of his later letters to close friends, including Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Rod Padgett, Larry Rivers, and James Schuyler, among others. While the letters reveal many sides of the brilliant and independent-minded Porter, they also provide a cultural context for the time period and the circle of artists and poets with whom Porter associated. The letters not only tell a story of the artist himself but are also valuable documents of the political and artistic upheavals of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

This rich collection is introduced by poet and critic David Lehman and includes notes by Justin Spring, author of Porter's biography.
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The Matrix of Lyric Transformation
Poetic Modes and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry
Cai Zong-qi
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Pentasyllabic poetry has been a focus of critical study since the appearance of the earliest works of Chinese literary criticism in the Six Dynasties period. Throughout the subsequent dynasties, traditional Chinese critics continued to examine pentasyllabic poetry as a leading poetic type and to compile various comprehensive anthologies of it.
The Matrix of Lyric Transformation enriches this tradition, using modern analytical methods to explore issues of self-expression and to trace the early formal, thematic, and generic developments of this poetic form. Beginning with a discussion of the Yüeh-fu and ku-shih genres of the Han period, Cai Zong-qi introdues the analytical framework of modes from Western literary criticism to show how the pentasyllabic poetry changed over time. He argues that changing practices of poetic composition effected a shift from a dramatic mode typical of folk compositions to a narrative mode and finally to lyric and symbolic modes developed in literati circles.
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The Matter of Disability
Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect
David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2019
The Matter of Disability returns disability to its proper place as an ongoing historical process of corporeal, cognitive, and sensory mutation operating in a world of dynamic, even cataclysmic, change. The book’s contributors offer new theorizations of human and nonhuman embodiments and their complex evolutions in our global present, in essays that explore how disability might be imagined as participant in the “complex elaboration of difference,” rather than something gone awry in an otherwise stable process. This alternative approach to materiality sheds new light on the capacities that exist within the depictions of disability that the book examines, including Spider-Man, Of Mice and Men, and Bloodchild.
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Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition
Warren D. Anderson
University of Michigan Press, 1988
To be born into the middle or upper classes of Matthew Arnold's England was in a sense to be born into the classical tradition. The precise contour and uses of the tradition, in Arnold's thought and writing, are the subject of this unique study by Warren D. Anderson. In Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition, Anderson shows how the young poet first experimented with his classical heritage, how he moved toward deep involvement and then withdrew to a more objective position. The author examines Arnold's school and university background, his poetry and later prose, his relationship to Stoicism and Epicureanism. The resulting study is absolutely central to an appreciation of Arnold and to an understanding of the classical foundations of Western literature. It shows clearly and accurately the ways in which the nineteenth century interpreted the fifth century B.C.
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Meadowood Phase Settlement Pattern in the Niagara Frontier Region of Western New York State
Joseph E. Granger, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 1978
In this work the author reports on his excavation of the Sinking Ponds site in Erie County, New York. He combines this with extensive information on the Riverhaven 2 site and a general definition and description of the Meadowood Phase in New York State. Using assemblages excavated in these areas of the Niagara Frontier, Granger explores adaptive processes (procurement, manufacturing, storage, and exchange) of the Meadowood settlement pattern and settlement system.
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front cover of The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerabilities of Democracies
The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerabilities of Democracies
A Response to Tocqueville's Challenge
Vincent Ostrom
University of Michigan Press, 1997
We struggle in the modern age to preserve individual freedoms and social self-government in the face of large and powerful governments that lay claim to the symbols and language of democracy, according to Vincent Ostrom.
Arguing that democratic systems are characterized by self-governing--not state- governed--societies, Ostrom contends that the nature and strength of individual relationships and self-organizing behavior are critical to the creation and survival of a democratic political system. Ostrom begins with a basic contradiction identified by Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville suggested that if citizens acted on the basis of their natural inclinations they would expect government to provide for them and take care of their needs. Yet these conditions contradict what it means to be self-governing. Ostrom explores the social and cultural context necessary for a democratic system to flourish emphasizing the important role of ideas and the use of language in defining and understanding political life. Discussing differences in the ideas about social organization among various cultural and intellectual traditions, he considers the difficulties encountered over time in building democratic societies in America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. He outlines lessons from these experiences for the efforts to build democracy in the developing world and the countries emerging from communism.
Based on a lifetime of thinking about the social conditions necessary to support a democracy, this book makes a significant contribution to the recent discussion about civil society and the fragility of our formal and informal social institutions and will be of interest to social scientists, historians and all readers concerned with the state of democracy in the modern world.
Vincent Ostrom is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science Emeritus and Co-Director of the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University. He is the author of many works on political theory and public administration.
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The Measure of Manliness
Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel
Karen Bourrier
University of Michigan Press, 2015
The Measure of Manliness is among the first books to focus on representations of disability in Victorian literature, showing that far from being marginalized or pathologized, disability was central to the narrative form of the mid-century novel. Mid-Victorian novels evidenced a proliferation of male characters with disabilities, a phenomenon that author Karen Bourrier sees as a response to the rise of a new Victorian culture of industry and vitality, and its corollary emphasis on a hardy, active manhood. The figure of the voluble, weak man was a necessary narrative complement to the silent, strong man. The disabled male embodied traditionally feminine virtues, softening the taciturn strong man, and eliciting emotional depths from his seemingly coarse muscular frame. Yet, the weak man was able to follow the strong man where female characters could not, to all-male arenas such as the warehouse and the public school.

The analysis yokes together historical and narrative concerns, showing how developments in nineteenth-century masculinity led to a formal innovation in literature:  the focalization or narration of the novel through the perspective of a weak or disabled man. The Measure of Manliness charts new territory in showing how feeling and loquacious bodies were increasingly seen as sick bodies throughout the nineteenth century. The book will appeal to those interested in disability studies, gender and masculinity studies, the theorization of sympathy and affect, the recovery of women’s writing and popular fiction, the history of medicine and technology, and queer theory.
 

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front cover of Measurement of Nontariff Barriers
Measurement of Nontariff Barriers
Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
As tariffs on imports of manufactures have been reduced as a result of multi-lateral trade negotiations, interest in the extent to which existing nontariff barriers may distort and restrict international trade is growing. Accurate and reliable measures are needed in order to address the issues involving the use and impacts of nontariff barriers. This study assesses currently available methods for quantifying such barriers and makes recommendations as to those methods that can be most effectively employed. The authors focus both on the conceptual issues arising in the measurement of the different types of nontariff barriers and on the applied research that has been carried out in studies prepared by country members of the OECD Pilot Group and others seeking to quantify the barriers.
Nontariff barriers include quotas, variable levies, voluntary export restraints, government procurement regulations, domestic subsidies, and antidumping and countervailing duty measures. The authors discuss the many different methods available for measuring the effects of these and other nontariff barriers. Illustrative results are presented for industrial OECD countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Norway, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Finally, the authors offer guideline principles and recommend procedures for measuring different types of nontariff barriers.
Economists, political scientists, government officials, and lawyers involved in international trade will find this an invaluable resource for understanding and measuring NTBs.
Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern are Professors of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.
[more]

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The Media Players
Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News
Stephen Wittek
University of Michigan Press, 2015
The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News builds a case for the central, formative function of Shakespeare’s theater in the news culture of early modern England. In an analysis that combines historical research with recent developments in public sphere theory, Dr. Stephen Wittek argues that the unique discursive space created by commercial theater helped to foster the conceptual framework that made news possible.

Dr. Wittek’s analysis focuses on the years between 1590 and 1630, an era of extraordinary advances in English news culture that begins with the first instance of serialized news in England and ends with the emergence of news as a regular, permanent fixture of the marketplace. Notably, this period of expansion in news culture coincided with a correspondingly extraordinary era of theatrical production and innovation, an era that marks the beginning of commercial theater in London, and has left us with the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton.
[more]

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Media Reform and the Climate Emergency
Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future
David J. Park
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Award-winning author David J. Park argues that the battle against global warming is also a fight for media reform. With his new book Media Reform and the Climate Emergency: Rethinking Communication in the Struggle for a Sustainable Future, he critically examines how advertising, the digital infrastructure, and journalism advance the climate emergency and lays out a path of reform to help create a more sustainable world. The production and consumption of goods and services within consumer societies lead to unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions, and Park finds that much of mass communication is either dependent upon or closely tied to the success of this social organization. As a result, he suggests successful environmental movements creatively dismantle or reform institutional infrastructures that extend the planetary global warming crisis and the unsustainable consumption of nature.

Communication policies and industries are part of these infrastructures. Advertising evolved to propel a new consumer society that would encourage the over-consumption of goods and services with harmful and unsustainable production processes. Our digital infrastructure is largely premised upon the surveillance of online consumer habits and preferences, with the goal to create individualized messages to more effectively persuade people to increase their consumption habits. Much of commercial journalism resists the drastic and immediate regulatory changes necessary to address the worst aspects of this crisis. This is because so many of the needed changes challenge the media’s source of income, their libertarian philosophy, and the general status quo, which is preferred by elites. Bound to foster conversations among scholars, activists, politicians, and those who work in the communication industries, this book rethinks mass communication and highlights how immediate reform is needed in the struggle for a sustainable planet.

[more]

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Media, Technology, and Society
Theories of Media Evolution
W. Russell Neuman
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"This book is the perfect primer for understanding media in the digital age. We are in an era when newspaper, radio, and television are fast becoming archeological concepts. Herein are the reasons why."
---Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child and cofounder of the MIT Media Laboratory

"Congratulations to Neuman and colleagues for a fascinating exploration of how previous new media were constructed, whether things could have been otherwise, and what can be learned for future media."
---Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications, the London School of Economics and Political Science

In Media, Technology, and Society, some of the most prominent figures in media studies explore the issue of media evolution. Focusing on a variety of compelling examples in media history, ranging from the telephone to the television, the radio to the Internet, these essays collectively address a series of notoriously vexing questions about the nature of technological change. Is it possible to make general claims about the conditions that enable or inhibit innovation? Does government regulation tend to protect or thwart incumbent interests? What kinds of concepts are needed to address the relationship between technology and society in a nonreductive and nondeterministic manner? To what extent can media history help us to understand and to influence the future of media in constructive ways? The contributors' historically grounded responses to these questions will be relevant to numerous fields, including history, media and communication studies, management, sociology, and information studies.

W. Russell Neuman is John Derby Evans Professor of Media Technology and Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan.

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library

[more]

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The Media Welfare State
Nordic Media in the Digital Era
Trine Syvertsen, Gunn Enli, Ole J. Mjøs, and Hallvard Moe
University of Michigan Press, 2014

The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era comprehensively addresses the central dynamics of the digitalization of the media industry in the Nordic countries—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland—and the ways media organizations there are transforming to address the new digital environment. Taking a comparative approach, the authors provide an overview of media institutions, content, use, and policy throughout the region, focusing on the impact of information and communication technology/internet and digitalization on the Nordic media sector. Illustrating the shifting media landscape the authors draw on a wide range of cases, including developments in the press, television, the public service media institutions, and telecommunication.

[more]

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Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel
Eberhard Werner Happel, 1647-1690
Gerhild Scholz Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Eberhard Happel, German Baroque author of an extensive body of work of fiction and nonfiction, has for many years been categorized as a “courtly-gallant” novelist. In Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel, author Gerhild Scholz Williams argues that categorizing him thus is to seriously misread him and to miss out on a fascinating perspective on this dynamic period in German history.

Happel primarily lived and worked in the vigorous port city of Hamburg, which was a “media center” in terms of the access it offered to a wide library of books in public and private collections.  Hamburg’s port status meant it buzzed with news and information, and Happel drew on this flow of data in his novels. His books deal with many topics of current interest—national identity formation, gender and sexualities, Western European encounters with neighbors to the East, confrontations with non-European and non-Western powers and cultures—and they feature multiple media, including news reports, news collections, and travel writings. As a result, Happel’s use of contemporary source material in his novels feeds our current interest in the impact of the production of knowledge on seventeenth-century narrative. Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel explores the narrative wealth and multiversity of Happel’s work, examines Happel’s novels as illustrative of seventeenth-century novel writing in Germany, and investigates the synergistic relationship in Happel’s writings between the booming print media industry and the evolution of the German novel.

[more]

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Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea
Michelle Cho and Jesook Song
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking to interrogate the role of popular media in establishing and shaping gendered common sense, this volume fosters cross-disciplinary conversations linked by the central thesis that gender discourse and representation are central to the politics, aesthetics, and economics of contemporary South Korea. In the post-authoritarian period (the late 1980s to the #MeToo present), media representation and popular discourse changed the gender conventions that are found at the core of civic, political, and cultural debates. 

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea maps the ways in which popular media and public discourse make the social dynamics of gender visible and open them up for debate and dismantling. In presenting innovative new research on the ways in which popular ideas about gender gain concrete form and political substance through mass mediation, the book’s contributors investigate the discursive production of gender in contemporary South Korea through trends, tropes, and thematics, as popular media become the domain in which new gendered subjectivities and relations transpire. The essays in this volume present cases and media objects that span multiple media and platforms, introducing new ways of thinking about gender as a platform and a conceptual infrastructure in the post-authoritarian era.
[more]

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Mediating the South Korean Other
Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State
David C. Oh, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship.

This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism ,” a more nuanced translation  of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others, and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats.
[more]

front cover of Medical Lives and Scientific Medicine at Michigan, 1891-1969
Medical Lives and Scientific Medicine at Michigan, 1891-1969
Joel D. Howell, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1993

U.S. health care has changed dramatically during the past century. A new breed of physicians use new machines, vaccines, and ideas in ways that have touched the lives of virtually everyone. How and why did these changes occur?

The biographical essays comprising this volume address this question through the stories of six scientific innovators at the University of Michigan Medical School. Michigan was the first major U.S. medical school to admit women, to run its own university hospital, and, by the turn of the century, was recognized as one of the finest medical schools in the country. The people whose stories unfold here played a central part in defining the place of medical science at the University of Michigan and in the larger world of U.S. health care.

Introductory sections are followed by biographical profiles of George Dock, Thomas Francis, Albion Hewlett, Louise Newburgh, Cyrus Strurgis, and Frank Wilson. Drawing on extensive archival research, the authors provide a richly textured portrait of academic medical life and reveal how the internal content of science and medicine interacted with the social context of each subject's life. Also explored is the relationship between the environment (the hospital, the university, and the city) and the search for knowledge.

These narratives expand our perspective on twentieth-century medical history by presenting these individuals' experiences as extended biopsies of the period and place, focal points illuminating the personal nature of medicine and locating the discipline within a social and institutional setting.

Joel D. Howell is Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Department of History, and Department of Health Services Management and Policy, University of Michigan.

[more]

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Medical Malpractice and the American Jury
Confronting the Myths about Jury Incompetence, Deep Pockets, and Outrageous Damage Awards
Neil Vidmar
University of Michigan Press, 1997
In this landmark book, Neil Vidmar looks beyond the common perceptions of medical malpractice litigation and finds a system that is fair, impartial, and intelligent. Firmly grounded in a wealth of empirical data, the author presents a fresh look at a civil jury system that has been maligned as out-of-touch, capricious, and disposed to awarding exorbitant, unjustified amounts to plaintiffs whenever they have the opportunity. In an era when tort reform is high on the congressional agenda, Medical Malpractice and the American Jury is almost alone in voicing reason and fact.
Written in a thoroughly inviting, jargon-free style, Medical Malpractice and the American Jury places those cases that go to trial in the broader context of litigation, noting that only about ten percent of malpractice cases ever result in trials. Of those that do go to trial, the author notes, more than two out of three cases are decided in the doctor's favor--repudiating the view that jurors are inherently biased against doctors and are motivated more by sympathy for the plaintiff than by the facts of the case.
Neil Vidmar comprehensively addresses all the claims that have been leveled against the performance of malpractice juries. For example, he compares actual jury decisions on negligence with neutral physicians' ratings of whether negligence occurred in the medical treatment and finds a remarkable consistency--repudiating the view that jurors are unable to understand experts or uncritically defer to their opinion.
"Medical Malpractice and the American Jury is quite simply the most compelling, comprehensive examination of the American jury system yet written. It brings reason and fact to the debate in a way that puts the lie to the many myths surrounding medical negligence cases. For anyone genuinely interested in just solutions, this book should be required reading. To act in ignorance of its findings invites disaster." --Trial
"For anyone really interested in the evidence about the daily grind of the courthouse mill, Neil Vidmar's Medical Malpractice and the American Jury is a good place to start." --Washington Post Book World
Neil Vidmar is Professor of Social Science and Law, Duke Law School, and Professor of Psychology, Duke University.
[more]

front cover of Medication in Maternity
Medication in Maternity
Infant Exposure and Maternal Information
Yvonne Brackbill, Karen McManus, and Lynn Woodward
University of Michigan Press, 1985
Mothers often know very little about the drugs they receive during pregnancy and even less about the drugs they consume during childbirth. The adverse fetal effects of drugs—whether prescription or over-the-counter—and the information mothers receive from the drug and medical communities about those drugs are shown in this International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities monograph. The research for the study presented in Medication in Maternity included 602 mothers, and as such must be seen as a significant contribution to the field of neonatology in general and to learning disabilities specifically. The authors' findings indicate that many infants are exposed to prenatal and during-birth drugs that could cause learning difficulties or have other toxic effects, and that mothers are rarely told what drugs they are taking or how those drugs could harm their child.
[more]

front cover of Medicinal Plants of Native America, Vols. 1 and 2
Medicinal Plants of Native America, Vols. 1 and 2
Daniel E. Moerman
University of Michigan Press, 1987
In this encyclopedia of North American ethnobotany, thousands of native plants are organized by family, genus, use (illness), tribal culture, and common name. Foreword by Richard I. Ford.
[more]

front cover of Medicine at Michigan
Medicine at Michigan
A History of the University of Michigan Medical School at the Bicentennial
Dea H. Boster and Joel D. Howell
University of Michigan Press, 2017
A trailblazer in American medical education since 1850, the Medical School at the University of Michigan was the first program in the United States to own and operate its own hospital and the earliest major medical school to admit women. In the late nineteenth century, the School emerged as a frontrunner in modern scientific medical education in the United States, and one of the first in the nation to implement both required clinical clerkships and laboratory science as part of their curriculum, including the first full laboratory course in bacteriology. Decades later, the Medical School remained at the vanguard of medical education by increasing its focus on research, and these efforts resulted in world-changing breakthroughs such as field-testing the first safe polio vaccine, proposing a genetic mechanism for sickle cell anemia, inventing the fiber-optic endoscope, and cloning the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. The Medical School’s history is not without its growing pains: alongside top-tier education and incredible innovation came times of stress with the broader University and Ann Arbor communities, complex expectations and realities for student diversity, and many controversies over curriculum and methodology. Medicine at Michigan explores how the School has dealt with changes in medical science, practice, and social climates over the past 150 years and illuminates the complicated interactions between economic, social, and cultural trends and medical education at the University of Michigan and across the nation. This book will appeal to readers interested in the history of medicine as well as current and former medical faculty members, students, and employees of the University of Michigan Medical School.
[more]

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The Medieval Constitution of Liberty
Political Foundations of Liberalism in the West
Alexander William Salter and Andrew T. Young
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Why did enduring traditions of economic and political liberty emerge in Western Europe and not elsewhere? Representative democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law are crucial for establishing a just and prosperous society, which we usually treat as the fruits of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, as Western European societies put the Dark Ages behind them.

In The Medieval Constitution of Liberty, Salter and Young point instead to the constitutional order that characterized the High Middle Ages. They provide a historical account of how this constitutional order evolved following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. This account runs from the settlements of militarized Germanic elites within the imperial frontiers, to the host of successor kingdoms in the sixth and seventh centuries, and  through the short-lived Carolingian empire of the late eighth and ninth centuries and the so-called “feudal anarchy” that followed its demise. Given this unique historical backdrop, Salter and Young consider the resulting structures of political property rights. They argue that the historical reality approximated a constitutional ideal type, which they term polycentric sovereignty. Salter and Young provide a theoretical analysis of polycentric sovereignty, arguing that bargains between political property rights holders within that sort of constitutional order will lead to improvements in governance.

[more]

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Medieval Jerusalem
Forging an Islamic City in Spaces Sacred to Christians and Jews
Jacob Lassner
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Medieval Jerusalem examines an old question that has recently surfaced and given rise to spirited discussion among Islamic historians and archeologists: what role did a city revered for its holiness play in the unfolding politics of the early Islamic period? Was there an historic moment when the city, holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, may have been considered as the administrative center of a vast Islamic world, as some scholars on early Islam have recently claimed? Medieval Jerusalem also emphasizes the city’s evolution as a revered Islamic religious site comparable to the holy cities Mecca and Medina.

Examining Muslim historiography and religious lore in light of Jewish traditions about the city, Jacob Lassner points out how these reworked Jewish traditions and the imposing monumental Islamic architecture of the city were meant to demonstrate that Islam had superseded Judaism and Christianity as the religion for all monotheists. He interrogates the literary sources of medieval Islamic historiography and their modern interpreters as if they were witnesses in a court of law, and applies the same method for the arguments about the monuments of the city’s material culture, including the great archaeological discoveries along the south wall of the ancient Temple Mount.

This book will be of interest to a broad range of readers given the significance of the city in the current politics of the Near East. It will in part serve as a corrective to narratives of Jerusalem’s past that are currently popular for scholarly and political reasons. 

 
 
[more]

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The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time
Miriamne Ara Krummel
University of Michigan Press, 2022
The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time studies violent temporal clashes that are written into the medieval vision of annus domini [the year of our Lord]. Christian temporality represents Jewish time as queerly oddly outmoded and advocating uncivil and socially disruptive behavior. Jewish temporality, in turn, records a marginalized people who work to rescue their embattled temporality from becoming a time forgotten and colonized. Through a select group of literature in Middle English, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as sixteen manuscript pictorials, author Miriamne Ara Krummel confronts the notion that annus domini time (whether disguised as CE or AD) figures as the universal standard. Krummel’s argument details how Other temporalities—ones outside and not like annus domini time—are cast as nonstandard and imagined as wholly devised out of stories that promote fear and terror, and are positioned as putative threats to the fabric of the temporal empire of Latin Christendom. Ultimately, the book reflects on the ways in which “common” time both marks and silences marginal identities and cultures and shows to what extent the dynamics of the medieval environment materialize in our modern world.
 
[more]

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Medieval Women and Their Objects
Jenny Adams and Nancy Mason Bradbury, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The essays gathered in this volume present multifaceted considerations of the intersection of objects and gender within the cultural contexts of late medieval France and England. Some take a material view of objects, showing buildings, books, and pictures as sites of gender negotiation and resistance and as extensions of women’s bodies. Others reconsider the concept of objectification in the lives of fictional and historical medieval women by looking closely at their relation to gendered material objects, taken literally as women’s possessions and as figurative manifestations of their desires.

The opening section looks at how medieval authors imagined fictional and legendary women using particular objects in ways that reinforce or challenge gender roles. These women bring objects into the orbit of gender identity, employing and relating to them in a literal sense, while also taking advantage of their symbolic meanings. The second section focuses on the use of texts both as objects in their own right and as mechanisms by which other objects are defined. The possessors of objects in these essays lived in the world, their lives documented by historical records, yet like their fictional and legendary counterparts, they too used objects for instrumental ends and with symbolic resonances. The final section considers the objectification of medieval women’s bodies as well as its limits. While this at times seems to allow for a trade in women, authorial attempts to give definitive shapes and boundaries to women’s bodies either complicate the gender boundaries they try to contain or reduce gender to an ideological abstraction. This volume contributes to the ongoing effort to calibrate female agency in the late Middle Ages, honoring the groundbreaking work of Carolyn P. Collette.
 

[more]

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Mediterranean in Dis/order
Space, Power, and Identity
Rosita Di Peri and Daniel Meier, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Mediterranean in Dis/order reveals the connection between space and politics by examining the role that space has played in insurgencies, conflicts, uprisings, and mobilities in the Mediterranean region. With this approach, the authors are able to challenge well-established beliefs about the power structure of the state across different disciplines (including political science, history, sociology, geography, and anthropology), and its impact on the conception, production, and imagination of space in the broader Mediterranean. Further, they contribute to particular areas of studies, such as migration, political Islam, mobilization, and transition to democracy, among others. The book, infusing critical theory, unveils original and revelatory case studies in Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Morocco, and the EU Mediterranean policy, through a various set of actors and practices—from refugees and migrations policies, to Islamist or students’ movements, architectural sites, or movies. This multidisciplinary perspective on space and power provides a valuable resource for practitioners interested in how space, context, and time interact to produce institutions, political subjectivities, and asymmetries of power, particularly since the turning point of the Arab uprisings. The book also helps readers understand the conditions under which the uprisings develop, giving a clearer picture about various national, regional, and international dynamics.

[more]

front cover of Meearmeear Traditions
Meearmeear Traditions
C. C. Trowbridge
University of Michigan Press, 1938
In his position of secretary to Lewis Cass, the governor of Michigan Territory, C. C. Trowbridge negotiated treaties, served as interpreter, and wrote reports on the customs of the Miami, Menominee, Shawnee, and Wyandot tribes. He wrote the manuscript entitled Meearmeear Traditions (meearmeear being a transliteration of “Miami”) in the early 1820s; the University of Michigan published it in 1938. Contains 1 b&w plate.
[more]

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Meeting the Needs of SLIFE, Second Ed.
A Guide for Educators
Andrea DeCapua, Helaine W. Marshall, and Lixing Frank Tang
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Today's public schools are brimming with students who are not only new to English but who also have limited or interrupted schooling. These students, referred to as SLIFE (or SIFE), create unique challenges for teachers and administrators.
 
Like its predecessor, this book is grounded in research and is designed to be an accessible and practical resource for teachers, staff, and administrators who work with students with limited or interrupted formal education. Chapters 3-5 focus on classroom instruction, but others address issues of concern to administrators and staff too. For example, Chapter 6 explores different program models for SLIFE instruction, but the planning and commitment to creating a successful program require the involvement of many across the school community, not just teachers. 
 
This edition features case studies, model programs, and teaching techniques and tips; also included is a new chapter focused on the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP (R)). A major theme of this new edition is moving school personnel away from a deficit perspective, when it comes to teaching SLIFE, and toward one of difference. The goal is to help all stakeholders in the school community create and foster inclusion of, and equity for, a population that is all too often marginalized, ignored, and underserved.
[more]

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Melancholy, Love, and Time
Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature
Peter Toohey
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Ancient literature features many powerful narratives of madness, depression, melancholy, lovesickness, simple boredom, and the effects of such psychological states upon individual sufferers. Peter Toohey turns his attention to representations of these emotional states in the Classical, Hellenistic, and especially the Roman imperial periods in a study that illuminates the cultural and aesthetic significance of this emotionally charged literature. His probing analysis shows that a shifting representation of these afflicted states, and the concomitant sense of isolation from one's social affinities and surroundings, manifests a developing sense of the self and self-consciousness in the ancient world.
This book makes important contributions to a variety of disciplines including classical studies, comparative literature, literary and art history, history of medicine, history of emotions, psychiatry, and psychology.
Peter Toohey is Professor and Department Head of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada.
[more]

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Memoria Romana
Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory
edited by Karl Galinsky
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Concern with memory permeated Roman literature, history, rhetorical training, and art and architecture. This is the first book to look at the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, including cognitive science. There is no orthodoxy in memory studies and the approaches are both empirical and theoretical. A central issue is: who and what preserved and shaped cultural memory in Rome, and how did that process work? Areas and subjects covered include the Romans' view of the changing physical fabric of the city, monuments (by etymology related to memory) such as the Arch of Constantine, memory and the Roman triumph, Roman copies of Greek sculpture and their relation to memory, the importance of written information and of continuing process, the creation of memory in Republican memoirs and Flavian poetry, the invention of traditions, and the connection of cultural and digital memory.

The ten chapters present original findings that complement earlier scholarship from the perspective of memory and open up new horizons for inquiry. The introduction by volume editor Karl Galinsky situates the work within current studies on cultural and social memory, and the concluding chapter by Daniel Libeskind provides the perspective of a contemporary practitioner.

Additional contributors include Richard Jenkyns, Harriet I. Flower, T. P. Wiseman, Karl-J. Hölkeskamp, Gianpiero Rosati, Diane Favro, Jessica Hughes, Anna Anguissola, Lisa Marie Mignone, and Bernard Frischer.

[more]

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Memories of the Revolution
The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater
Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2015
The women’s experimental theater space called the WOW Café (Women’s One World) has been a vital part of New York’s downtown theater scene since 1980. Since that time, WOW has provided a place for feminist and particularly lesbian theater artists to create, perform, and witness a cultural revolution. Its renowned alumnae include playwright and actor Lisa Kron, performance artists Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana, the theater troupe the Five Lesbian Brothers, and actors/playwrights Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin, among others.

Memories of the Revolution collects scripts, interviews, and commentary to trace the riotous first decade of WOW. While the histories of other experimental theater collectives have been well documented, WOW’s history has only begun to be told. The anthology also includes photographs of and reminiscences by Café veterans, capturing the history and artistic flowering of the first ten years of this countercultural haven.
[more]

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Memory, Meaning, and Resistance
Reflecting on Oral History and Women at the Margins
Fran Leeper Buss
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Fran Leeper Buss, a former welfare recipient who earned a PhD in history and became a pioneer in the field of oral history, has for forty years dedicated herself to the goal of collecting the stories of marginal and working-class U.S. women. Memory, Meaning, and Resistance is based on over 100 oral histories gathered from women from a variety of racial, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds, including a traditional Mexican American midwife, a Latina poet and organizer for the United Farm Workers, and an African American union and freedom movement organizer. Buss now analyzes this body of work, identifying common themes in women’s lives and resistance that unite the oral histories she has gathered. From the beginning, her work has shed light on the inseparable, compounding effects of gender, race, ethnicity, and class on women’s lives—what is now commonly called intersectionality. Memory, Meaning, and Resistance is structured thematically, with each chapter analyzing a concept that runs through the oral histories, e.g., agency, activism, religion. The result is a testament to women’s individual and collective strength, and an invaluable guide for students and researchers, on how to effectively and sensitively conduct oral histories that observe, record, recount, and analyze women’s life stories. 
 
[more]

front cover of Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama
Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama
Jeanette R. Malkin
University of Michigan Press, 1999
This book examines the theme of memory in a range of plays by contemporary American and European playwrights, including Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Thomas Bernhard, and Elfriede Jelinek. Jeanette R. Malkin proposes that postmodern drama--that is, drama since the 1970s--can be defined and examined according to the ways it recasts history and engages memories of the past. Details from our cultural and historical past are of course always fundamental elements of literature and theater: the past haunts the stage. But is the past as it is represented on stage actually the true past? In many of the plays examined in Malkin's book, the past is no longer grounded. Instead, it is a past which floats within the collective unconscious, in a place of fragmented collective identity. These plays "remember" in ways parallel to the theories of knowledge that inform them and thus become paradigms for a vision of the world.
Malkin's study seeks answers to questions such as: what are the connections between contemporary drama and processes of memory? How do contemporary aesthetics shape these plays and the memories that they enact? What is remembered and how is the audience targeted? Why is memory so central to so many postmodern theater texts? In answering these questions, Malkin compellingly demonstrates how the past is made present within the double walls of memory and of the theater.
"A very important book that bids to be a 'must have' on the timely topic of history versus memory as it is represented in theater." --John Rouse, University of California, San Diego
Jeanette R. Malkin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
[more]

front cover of A Menopausal Gentleman
A Menopausal Gentleman
The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw
Peggy Shaw
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"With classic butch finesse---that handsome combination of vulnerability and toughness---Peggy Shaw pieces together the challenges of growing up butch in the 1950s. Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."
---Gay Community News

Obie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.

This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic Menopausal Gentleman); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw You're Just Like My Father); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated To My Chagrin); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical Must: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.

A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance
Cover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).

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front cover of The Merchant Class of Medieval London
The Merchant Class of Medieval London
1300-1500
Sylvia L. Thrupp
University of Michigan Press, 1989
A social history of the merchant class of 14th- and 15th-century London
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front cover of The Merchant of Prato's Wife
The Merchant of Prato's Wife
Margherita Datini and Her World, 1360-1423
Ann Crabb
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Although the fourteenth-century Italian merchant Francesco Datini has received attention from business historians, there has previously been no full study of his wife, Margherita Datini. Drawing on a sizable trove of Margherita’s correspondence held in the Archivio di Stato di Prato, including hundreds of letters she exchanged with Francesco, Ann Crabb investigates the social and economic importance of women’s roles as wives and mothers, early modern European views on honor, and the practice of letter writing in Margherita’s world.

Margherita’s often colorful comments demonstrate her attitudes toward her rather unhappy marriage and her inability to have children, along with other aspects of her life. Her letters reveal the pride she felt in carrying out her many responsibilities as a wife and, later, a widow: in scribal letter writing, in business, in household management, and in farming. Crabb emphasizes that the role of a wife was a recognized social position, beyond her individual relations with her husband, and provided opportunities beyond what restrictive laws or restrictive views of female honor would suggest. Further, Crabb considers Margherita’s successful efforts, on her own initiative and in her late thirties, to learn to read and write at a literate level.

This book will be of interest to both scholars and general readers of women’s history. In addition, historians of early modern Italy and, more generally, of early modern Europe will find this book valuable.
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